To put it mildly, the world is a mess.
I love being a woman and I was not one of these women who rose through professional life by wearing men’s clothes or looking masculine. I loved wearing bright colors and being who I am.
Our collective experience has shown that when women have the power to make their own choices, good things happen.
We will not be intimidated or pushed off the world stage by people who do not like what we stand for, and that is, freedom, democracy and the fight against disease, poverty and terrorism.
When we’re trying to solve difficult national issues its sometimes necessary to talk to adversaries as well as friends. Historians have a word for this: diplomacy.
I do believe that in order to be a successful negotiator that as a diplomat, you have to be able to put yourself into the other person’s shoes. Unless you can understand what is motivating them, you are never going to be able to figure out how to solve a particular problem.
I enjoy wearing pins, and nobody tells me to do it.
Whatever the job you are asked to do at whatever level, do a good job because your reputation is your resume.
I saw what happened when a dictator was allowed to take over a piece of a country and the country went down the tubes. And I saw the opposite during the war when America joined the fight.
I was taught to strive not because there were any guarantees of success but because the act of striving is in itself the only way to keep faith with life.
Real leadership comes from the quiet nudging of an inner voice. It comes from realizing that the time has come to move beyond waiting to doing.
I’ve never been to New Zealand before. But one of my role models, Xena, the warrior princess, comes from there.
It took me quite a long time to develop a voice, and now that I have it, I am not going to be silent.
Jewelry and pins have been worn throughout history as symbols of power, sending messages. Interestingly enough, it was mostly men who wore the jewelry in various times, and obviously crowns were part of signals that were being sent throughout history by people of rank.
The reason I made women’s issues central to American foreign policy, was not because I was a feminist, but because we know that societies are more stable if women are politically and economically empowered.
I do not believe that things happen accidentally; I believe you earn them.
The main thing is to remain oneself, under any circumstances; that was and is our common purpose.
In A Man With a Pipe, my brother observed that although my father had been seen as intellectual and my mother more a creature of temperament, she had often been the more levelheaded of the two. In sum, we miss them as we love them, equally and always.
If we have to use force, it is because we are America.
I did go to Wellesley, a women’s college. And I am of a kind of strange generation which is transitional in terms of women who wanted to go out and get jobs.