Madeleine Albright
Madeleine Albright
Madeleine Jana Korbel Albright is an American politician and diplomat. She is the first woman to have become the United States Secretary of State. She was nominated by U.S. President Bill Clinton on December 5, 1996, and was unanimously confirmed by a U.S. Senate vote of 99–0. She was sworn in on January 23, 1997...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPolitician
Date of Birth15 May 1937
CitySmichov, Czech Republic
CountryUnited States of America
Glass ceilings have been broken, but more have to be broken.
We went to the same college so I know [Hillary Clinton's] study habits, but when she was first lady of Arkansas, she did a lot of things already for children, and she was head of the Children's Defense Fund, and that's how I first heard her or met her, she was very very involved in really a very important social program to do something about children and women and education.
The process of education in the oldest profession in the world is like any other educational process, in that it requires time andeffort and patience; it can only be acquired by taking one step at a time, though the steps become accelerated after the first few.
There are an awful lot of things going on that need understanding and explanation, but - to put it mildly - the world is a mess.
I'm a problem-solver.
Well we're good friends so I'm a little prejudice, but I think [Hillary Clinton] is incredibly qualified, and better prepared to be president than almost anyone who's ever run frankly.
I never dreamed about one day becoming Secretary of State. It's not that I was modest; it's just that I had never seen a Secretary of State in a skirt.
The main thing is to remain oneself, under any circumstances; that was and is our common purpose.
I have said this many times, that there seems to be enough room in the world for mediocre men, but not for mediocre women, and we really have to work very, very hard.
I went to a girls high school and I went to a women's college and when I first started teaching at Georgetown it had been a single sex school and so they wanted to have some women professors when they went co-ed, and so I originally was hired to start a program there, and really encourage women to go into foreign policy. I always have done that, and I really do think that things are better when women are involved.
You think that the heads of state only have serious conversations, but they actually often begin really with the weather or, 'I really like your tie.'
The capability of negotiating... is something that means you not only have to understand fully what you believe and what your national interests are but in order to be a really good negotiator, you have to try to figure out what the other person on the other side of the table has in mind.
Saddam's goal is to achieve the lifting of U.N. sanctions while retaining and enhancing Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs. We cannot, we must not and we will not let him succeed.
I had more problems with the men in our own government, and not because they were male chauvinistic pigs but because they had known me for so long. I might have been a carpool mother and a friend of their wife, and so they'd been to my house for dinner and things like and they thought 'how did she get to be secretary of state when I should be secretary of state?' So that was more of a problem.