Tony Blinken
speaker
307 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 23 Jul
Tony Blinken’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And the other thing is this.
you know there's so many things you can do in life and i've had the wonderful opportunity to do different things there's so many things you can do in life that are that bring satisfaction and joy and different people have different ways of finding that but i found that nothing could quite replace going to work every day with the stars and stripes behind me either literally or figuratively that feeling of representing in some small way my own country
in being part of a tradition of having done that, going back to our founding.
That to me was the most powerful thing.
And so one thing that gratifies me is I keep running into young people in one way or another, a rising generation that still want to do it.
And so I say, yes, absolutely.
Please do it.
But also, you know, keep your horizons broad.
There are different ways if you want to engage internationally, if you want to be part of the world.
It doesn't have to be the government.
It doesn't have to be the Foreign Service.
I hope that it would be, but it doesn't have to be.
There's so many other ways of doing that and finding ways to connect people up.
I'm convinced that just about anything we're grappling with as human beings, any problem, any challenge we're facing, somewhere, someone has probably figured out how to approach it, how to tackle it.
But if we're not talking to each other, if we're not engaged, if we're not creating these linkages, then everyone's got to go reinvent the wheel each time out.
Diplomacy fundamentally is about making sure that we try not to fight each other.
If we do fight each other, that we stop.
And more to the point that we build these connections and we build these connections for the betterment of people's lives.
That's an incredible thing to do with your life.
And what I would say to folks in the department when we'd actually get something done, when we distributed nearly a billion COVID vaccines, for example, is we got hostages released from a country, arbitrarily detained Americans.
Showing 261–280 of 307 · page 14 of 16
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