Because my parents fled in time, I escaped Hitler. Because of America's generosity, I escaped Stalin. Because of the vision of the Truman-Marshall generation, I have been privileged to live my life in freedom. Millions have still never had that opportunity.
Madeleine Albright
Harvard University Commencement 1997, 1997
这句语录背后的故事
Albright's most powerful passage was autobiographical. She had been born in Prague, sat in bomb shelters in wartime England 'singing away the fear and thanking God for American help,' and arrived in the United States after the Communist takeover. She mentioned her father's boss, Jan Masaryk, the Czechoslovak foreign minister who was told by Stalin that his country could not participate in the Marshall Plan — 'it was at that moment he understood he was employed by a government no longer sovereign in its own land.' The personal story gave moral urgency to the policy argument. Albright wasn't speaking abstractly about American leadership — she was its living embodiment, a refugee who had become the most powerful diplomat in the world. The parallel structure ('Because... I escaped... Because... I escaped... Because... I have been privileged') compressed an entire century of European catastrophe and American rescue into three sentences.
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