Biography

U. S. Secretary of State (23 January 1997 to 20 January 2001).

Madeleine's parents were Jews who converted to Catholicism in order to escape the Holocaust. Madeleine was supposedly only informed about her Jewish descent and heritage in her late adulthood (she stated she first heard about it at age 59). She had converted from Catholicism, as she had been raised, to join The Episcopal Church, the United States based member church of the worldwide Anglican Communion, a mainline Protestant denomination, in preparation for her marriage to Joseph Albright in 1959.

Her daughters, twins Alice and Anne, were born in June 1961. She then gave birth to another daughter who died soon after birth, and then had daughter Katherine.

Her parents, Josef Korbel, a Czechoslovakian diplomat, and Anna Spiegelova, named her Marie Jana; the name "Madeleine" came from "Madlenka," a childhood nickname.

Albright served as the U.S. permanent representative (Ambassador) to the United Nations from 1993-1997, before being appointed by President Bill Clinton to be the 64th U.S. Secretary of State in 1997, the first woman to serve in that position. Previously, she was also a university professor and adviser on international affairs as a member of the National Security Council during the administration of President Jimmy Carter.

[on 9/11] I don't want to sound Pollyannaish, but I hope that out of a tragedy like this something good will come. I hope we understand we're one family.

[on the legacy of US President George W. Bush] I wrote my book "Memo to the President-Elect" for the next President because [he or she] is going to have a very hard job to do. Our reputation is the lowest that it has ever been. This presidency has done a great deal of damage, and I'm very glad that it will end.

I have spent a lifetime looking for remedies to all manner of life's problems - personal, social, political, global. I am deeply suspicious of those who offer simple solutions and statements of absolute certainty or who claim full possession of the truth. Yet I have grown equally skeptical of those who suggest that all is too nuanced and complex for us to learn any lessons, that there are so many sides to everything that we can pursue knowledge every day of our lives and still know nothing for sure. I believe we can recognize truth when we see it, just not at first and not without ever relenting in our efforts to learn more. This is because the goal we seek, and the good we hope for, comes as not as some final reward but as the hidden companion to our quest. It is not what we find, but the reason that we cannot stop looking and striving, that tells us why we are here.

There's a special place in hell for women who don't help each other.

[on Donald Trump's fitness to make foreign-policy decisions as Commander-in-Chief] You need a President who actually knows where the countries are.