Fiona Hill Quotes

Russia is America’s Ghost of Christmas Future, a harbinger of things to come if we can’t adjust course and heal our political polarization.

my heart is a lonely hunter that hunts on a lonely hill.

No state, no matter how advanced, is immune from flawed leadership, the erosion of political checks and balances, and the degradation of its institutions.

Changes in technology come along roughly every five to seven years, so no one can ever have any expectation of permanence in the workplace. People's skills will always need upgrading. But the right kind of education for the twenty-first century is the one that prepares us to weather these changes—and which does so equally, without regard to where we are from or what your parents do.

To compete with China in the twenty-first century, the United States will have to give similar precedence to education reform and expand access to educational and training opportunities for all Americans, not just a select or privileged few.

You can’t perpetuate the myth in America of rugged individualism forever,” as she told me later. “Everyone benefits from networks and mentorships, but when men or people from affluent backgrounds network and mentor, nobody labels it like this. They are just ‘helping each other

Educational attainment is now a significant predictor of whether someone will have the opportunity to secure stable full-time employment and, crucially, how that person will vote.

A crisis to address at home becomes an opportunity to mess around abroad.

Education is the beating heart of the infrastructure of opportunity, but place—where you live—is the body that holds it. Place frames everything else. It has the greatest impact on an individual’s educational and economic opportunity and ability to build wealth. It can hold someone back from finding opportunity or provide a direct pathway to it. For all these reasons, unlocking the potential of place is one of the greatest imperatives of the twenty-first century.

struggle between capitalism and communism had concealed the fact that the United Kingdom, the USSR, and the United States had much in common. Once you lifted the veil, you could see the touch points beneath—especially when you knew what you were looking for.

Education in all its forms—from elementary to secondary to further education and professional training—is the beating heart of the infrastructure of opportunity. It has the potential to define and redefine who you are and who you will be. For me, it was everything.

In the euphoria at the end of the Cold War, the confluence of timing, events, and intent went unnoticed on the western side of the Iron Curtain. The UK and the U.S. could surely not have anything at all in common with the Soviet Union, given the total failure of its system . . . could we?

Populist governments are, almost by definition, ill-suited to handle complex problems of governance. Style, swagger, and atmospherics, superficial and simplistic solutions, and enthusiastic sloganeering form the core of the populist's playbook—and are the antithesis of the toolkit needed to deal with a deadly pandemic.

Initially in the United States, after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and then the collapse of the USSR in 1991, there was no sense that America too was in postindustrial decline. The idea that the West had won the Cold War and capitalism had prevailed over communism deflected attention from the troubles of America’s old manufacturing centers and their displaced workers.

Populism is a political approach with no fixed ideology. It can pop up on both the left and the right of political thinking, and pretty much in any setting. The essence of populism is creating a direct link with “the people” or specific groups within a population and either bypassing or eliminating intermediaries like political parties, parliamentary representatives, and established institutions. Referenda, plebiscites, direct appeals, and executive orders form the substance of populism.

Good men have only to do nothing, for evil to conquer" (137).

I do what I think I’m meant to do, but I find it hard. The noise of the applause – the din, that sense of mental concussion – is like the shooting up on the hill, only I was more comfortable there. More at ease. Since I can’t reasonably start shooting anyone now, I just shrink into myself and wait for it all to stop. For

Above the abbot's desk, two little prints. Icons, I suppose he would call them. A male figure and a female one. The male one is standing on a green hill and has a white dove perched on his shoulder. He sees me looking. 'You'll recognize our patron, of course?' It takes me a second, but I realise he's talking about St. David, a Welsh bishop of the sixth century and the patron saint of Wales. 'David,' I say. 'A local boy.' 'Local enough. He was preaching at the Synod of Brefi to a large crowd. Because those at the back couldn't hear him, a small hill rose up beneath him. The dove here settled on his shoulder.' 'That's his big miracle?' I ask. 'Making a hill. In Wales?

She knew that this would be her last summer. The warm caress of the late- spring sunlight couldn’t roll back the fog- like weariness that crept through her bones these days. But then there had been so many summers. Almost a hundred. She glanced up the hill, towards the little graveyard beyond the vines where those she loved the best were laid. They were waiting, now, to welcome her.

Russia is America’s Ghost of Christmas Future, a harbinger of things to come if we can’t adjust course and heal our political polarization

Prime among those political consequences: governments seemingly without the interest or ability to solve the deadly serious challenges of the twenty-first century.

the United States in the early 2000s, just like in the UK in the 1980s, no one from the federal government came forward with sustainable long-term solutions to people’s plight. Big banks and corporations got bailed out after the financial crisis, but not the American

At 1.4 billion in 2020, China’s population is four times that of the United States—a mismatch that

body blows. In 2016 voters had been looking for someone to address their economic grievances, or at the very least give voice to them. By the 2020 presidential election, they wanted

In this century (unlike the twentieth), the United States faces systemic competition not from Russia but from China. If it can’t figure out a way to quickly raise its game, it risks the diminution of its previous position of unrivaled economic, political, and military power since the end of the

toward all-time lows in 2019. Until the COVID-19 pandemic, many could cobble together a decent portfolio of part-time or contract work, or combine a full-time position with something additional and flexible in the service sector, like a ride-share job. But the portfolios of

Both Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump were a distraction from the real crisis at hand inside the United States

Ultimately, at the Trump White House, politics and personal connections were more important than qualifications, experience, and previous government service.

Style, swagger, and atmospherics, superficial and simplistic solutions, and enthusiastic sloganeering form the core of the populist’s playbook—and are the antithesis of the toolkit needed to deal with a deadly pandemic.

In early 2019, while I was still at the White House, BuzzFeed News published an article laying out the origins of the “Soros conspiracy.” It had originated in 2008, when two prominent political consultants in New York, Arthur Finkelstein and George Birnbaum, were recruited by Viktor Orbán to assist his political campaign. They had previously worked for Israeli prime minister Bibi Netanyahu, who was friendly with Orbán. Netanyahu recommended them. Finkelstein and Birnbaum decided they should create an external political enemy to help Orbán mobilize support for his bid to become Hungarian prime minister. They selected Soros, a prominent Hungarian Jew whose family had fled Budapest during the Holocaust. Soros was both famous and controversial, and still connected to Hungary.

to implement any or all of these fixes, the United States needed a federal-level vision and an organizing principle for action at the state and local government and community levels. First and foremost, though, legislators needed to begin by focusing on people.

Race is a deeply embedded, all-pervasive structural barrier to opportunity in the United States.

owning.

Everyone seemed to think it was somehow your fault, as a girl, if you were harassed, or didn’t laugh it off. Boys could get a job and go out and about in Bishop Auckland, anywhere, anytime, no repercussions or recriminations, but in your case, if something happened, well, what were you doing there? What were you thinking? Why were you, a girl, walking alone by the riverbank or down an empty street, or anywhere around town, at night on your own? You were just asking for it: trouble of some kind.

They highlighted mounting frustration with the legacy of the Atlantic slave trade and decades of entrenched racist attitudes in British society on top of the sharp uptick in national unemployment and the decline in public services.

and prominent intellectual and political elites leaves the playing field open for others to step in and present themselves as advocates for the entire working or middle class or other distinct underrepresented groups. Indeed, politics since 2000 has been marked by the rise of populists—politicians who spurn “out-of-touch experts” and who claim to speak on behalf of millions of people with whom they in fact have no authentic connection, and in whom they have no genuine interest beyond securing votes to support their own often very personal agendas. In America, the first sign of things to come was during the Great Recession, with the emergence of the Tea Party movement in the Republican Party, inside and outside Congress. The movement formed in reaction to the efforts by the administration of Barack Obama to bail out the U.S. financial sector in the midst of the economic crisis. Its members initially presented themselves as fiscal conservatives, calling for the kind of lower taxes and limited government spending espoused by Ronald Reagan. They quickly moved on to oppose the administration’s promotion of universal health care and other social policies, and soon morphed into an activist protest movement supporting new candidates for office with a mixture of conservative, libertarian, and right-wing populist credentials. Many of these Tea Party candidates would later support Donald Trump’s election in 2016.

They always present themselves as the champions of “the people.

Our health and politics show the effects of this profound imbalance. America is a rich country where millions of people have become so desperate and starved of opportunity, and others so disillusioned with the existing system of government, that they cling to whatever populist messages political leaders serve them, no matter how absurd or harmful.

In short, a college degree and other advanced or technical training were individuals’ personal investments in their own future, not part of the state’s investment in its population’s education or in the country’s future. The ethos of Thatcherism and Reaganism had spread from economics to education. Here, perhaps more than anywhere else, their influence would eventually prove disastrous on both a human and a political level.

Perhaps more than anything else, the press conference highlighted—for me, and for the public—just how low America could sink in its own estimation and in the eyes of the world. The country’s long-festering domestic crisis had exploded into view with Trump’s election, and now we were seeing the consequences on the international stage. This, I felt, was the agony of American populism. But it wasn’t over yet.

Alison Krauss, Lauryn Hill, Norah Jones. She added vintage Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, Carole King. She rounded it out with some edge: Fiona Apple, Courtney Love, Alanis Morissette.

Fiona Hill, as formidable a public servant as I have ever encountered, was prepared. And, as it turned out, because Donald Trump was the man he was and his administration was the threat to the United States it ultimately became, she had to be.

The men in all those towns and villages were decimated by war and work. There were no cenotaphs or special corners of the graveyard for those who died later from poverty or despair, or both, when the mines had gone, but there should have been.

Education is the beating heart of the infrastructure of opportunity, but place—where you live—is the body that holds it. Place frames everything else. It has the greatest impact on an individual’s educational and economic opportunity and ability to build wealth. It can hold someone back from finding opportunity or provide a direct pathway to it. For all these reasons, unlocking the potential of place is one of the greatest imperatives of the twenty-first century

In the final reckoning, in both the United Kingdom and the United States, there should be no such thing as the wrong place to live. And in America, our currently polarized partisan politics and fragmented sectarian society would look very different if we were able to realize the vision of a more inclusive nation where opportunity is spread more evenly across the country’s vast landscape and its population.

The challenge for us today is to create these kinds of mechanisms and networks for domestic relocation. Of course, these support systems cannot substitute for improving the overall quality of life in places like Bishop Auckland and small-town America, so people can stay where they already are, at home. But if people must leave to seek opportunity elsewhere, they should have a shot at doing so.

the solutions to our broken health-care and other parts of the social support system are staring us in the face. All it would take to implement them is political will.

In a ten-year period, for example, 176 rural hospitals and associated medical centers closed, forcing residents to drive long distances, sometimes for hours, even for emergency treatment.

You see how deviously the institution of marriage threads itself through a woman’s life? If she does not marry she is perpetually a child—until she is suddenly an old woman, that is.

We’re nearly at the top anyway. Definitely feeling like a donkey now, though.” “I take it back. You’re Shrek and I’m Princess Fiona.” He laughs and I jiggle as his shoulders shake. “Well, green is my favorite color.” “What type of green? Ogre green?” “Whatever shade your eyes are.

Infrastructure improvements, for basic transportation to get to work and Wi-Fi to enable people to work from home without climbing to the top of a compost heap or a birch tree, have to be developed with federal grants and low-interest community loans.

Poor student achievement in schools in impoverished areas, in both the UK and the U.S., reflects the demographics and the economy of the surrounding region. It does not indicate deficiencies in the talent, potential, and aspirations of individual students.

the average Black family had ten times less accumulated wealth than the average white family. And they were far less likely to own a home. This was often due to the legacy and persistence of restrictive zoning laws, tax code biases, and mortgage lending prohibitions dating from before the 1960s and the Civil Rights Act.

most social connections were formed through education in schools and colleges, then in the workplace

Private British companies, often under royal license, exported more than three million slaves from Africa (and initially poor white British men and women as indentured servants) to British colonies between 1640 and 1807. The slave trade was not formally abolished and prohibited until January 1, 1808, thanks to a parliamentary bill passed after two decades of bitter political debate in March 1807.

technology to stabilize his regime. In the United States, Putin was able to weaponize the same technology against us. Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms empowered marginalized groups, undermined social cohesion and social capital, and eroded Americans’ sense

Russia is America’s Ghost of Christmas Future, a harbinger of things to come if we can’t adjust course and heal our political polarization. In the late 1980s and 1990s, Russia entered a promising period of democratization that was ultimately weakened by political upheavals and attempted coups, overwhelmed by economic crisis, and undermined by declining opportunity. Vladimir Putin was the first populist president of a major country in the twenty-first century. He came into the presidency at the end of 1999 promising to make Russia a great power again, blazing a restorationist political trail at home and abroad. Putin set a personalized, bravura style of leadership that others, including Donald Trump, sought to emulate. And over the next two decades Putin rolled back Russia’s democratic gains to firmly entrench himself in the Kremlin. First he served as president, then as prime minister, and then as president again. Each time he made adjustments to Russia’s political system, until finally, in 2020, he amended the constitution. In theory, Vladimir Putin can now stay in power until 2036. Under the guise of Putin strengthening the state and restoring its global position, Russia slowly succumbed to authoritarianism.

America is marred by low societal cohesion, political fragmentation, loss of public trust in government, weakened national institutions, and reduced civic engagement. It is

2016 they complained about how Hillary Clinton was paid thousands of dollars to give corporate speeches and palled around with celebrities during her campaign, drinking champagne instead of coming to the American heartland to hear what they had to say about the state of the country. It was no matter that Trump was rich and had a lifestyle that could not have been more different from theirs, or that he had inherited his company from his father.

Boys could get a job and go out and about in Bishop Auckland, anywhere, anytime, no repercussions or recriminations, but in your case, if something happened, well, what were you doing there? What were you thinking? Why were you, a girl, walking alone by the riverbank or down an empty street, or anywhere around town, at night on your own? You were just asking for it: trouble of some kind.

Historically, polarization and populism--and their close traveling companions, extremism and authoritarianism--emerge from the politics of cultural despair.

think-tank report promoted the idea of the federal government creating a national service-year program and “scholarships for service” as part of a domestic version of the Peace Corps. Recent college graduates would enroll for one to two years of paid voluntary service and be placed within distressed communities across the United States. They would be matched up with local development projects, nonprofits, charities, and schools. The federal government would also forgive student loans for the period of service. The National Commission on Military, National, and Public Service, which was set up in 2017, proposed a similar idea in its final report in 2020. The commission advocated legislation to secure funding for national service and volunteering on a large scale that would enable young people

Even when it was clear that I wasn't the secretary or notetaker in academic seminars or meetings, my gender would get in the way. I would make a point and wait for a response, only to have some man repeat what I had said a few minutes later in a slightly different formulation. Every time it happened, imposter syndrome would kick in. I wondered, was it my impenetrable North East accent, did no one understand? Was it a stupid or irrelevant point? Was I simply not clear? Does everything a woman say have to be repeated by a man for it to be heard? On occasion I would find myself getting lectured on the very set of issues I worked on directly, sometimes even having to sit and listen as someone cited back something I had written in an article or policy paper, oblivious to where they had read it and whose idea it was. At every stage of my career, at Harvard, at the Brookings Institution, and in the U.S. government, something would happen to remind me of the fact that I was a woman, and not the same as the men around me.

The 2016 presidential election had marked both an obvious tipping point and a turning point in the United States. But Vladimir Putin's intervention concealed it, precisely by diverting attention to hime and Trump and what Putin might have done (or not done) to put Trump in office. Just like 2020, the 2016 election was, and should have been, an acknowledgement of and reconing with long neglected issues. [There is Nothing for You Here]

Who plays the Song of Songs upon the Hills of Dream? It is said Love is that need-player, for There is no song like his. But today I saw one, on these still garths of shadow and silence, who put a hollow reed to his lips and played a white spell of beauty. Then I knew Love and Sorrow to be one, as in the old myth of Oengus of the White Birds and The Grey Shadows.

National and international networking among extremists was greatly enhanced by entry into a digital world that operates on economically or commercially defined algorithms, which are specifically designed to attract people’s attention and divide them into “affinity groups.

Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms empowered marginalized groups, undermined social cohesion and social capital, and eroded Americans’ sense of common, shared purpose. The Russian intelligence

In his book and his lectures, Professor Kornai underscored that poor people and unemployment are the downside of every market economy, including in the United States. He pointed out that the market cannot and does not solve every social problem. And no matter what their aspirations and opportunities may be, not everyone will get rich. Society will always be divided into haves and have-nots; the key question for economists and policymakers to resolve was how to bridge the inevitable income and opportunity gaps. In the case of Eastern Europe, Professor Kornai had recommended the creation of a comprehensive social protection fund and financial aid to cushion the transition to the private sector for laid-off state factory workers.

from Edinburgh to the wilderness of Scotland’s west coast, and it was growing dark as they turned off the tiny road to bump along the drive of Arisaig House. The grey stone building, glimpsed between a phalanx of tall pines, with its blacked-out windows, and the dark hills rising steeply behind it, looked somewhat forbidding to Ella as she peered out through the window. She craned her neck to look up at the clock tower that stood sentry on one side of the courtyard, its gilded hands pointing towards eleven o’clock. As the truck drew to a halt, silence fell, broken only by the ticking of the cooling engine and the faint, plaintive cry of a nightbird from the seashore somewhere below them. A door opened, throwing a rectangle of light across the gravel, and Ella