“Although an enormous diversity of opinion was behind bars in the Gulag... all the dissidents understood that a society that does not protect the right of dissent, even if the society perfectly conforms to their own unique values and ideas, will inevitably turn into a fear society that endangers everybody.... A simple way to determine whether the right to dissent in a particular society is being upheld is to apply the town square test: Can a person walk into the middle of the town square and express his or her views without fear of arrest, imprisonment, or physical harm? If he can, then that person is living in a free society. If not, it’s a fear society.”
Natan Sharansky with Ron Dermer The Case for Democracy
"Religion alone makes the righting of wrongs seem urgent without magnifying them to fill the whole universe, alone allows of humility without subservience, determination without arrogance, and contentment without inertia. It is, in fact, the only alternative to Totalitarianism, which explains why religion and the Totalitarian State are always at war with one another."
Malcolm Muggeridge in "Time and Tide" (1937) in Ian Hunter, ed., The Very Best of Malcolm Muggeridge
"A country that does not respect the rights of its own people will not respect the rights of its neighbours."
Andrei Sakharov, quoted in Natan Sharansky with Ron Dermer The Case for Democracy
"The idea of liberty has ultimately a religious root; that is why men find it so easy to die for and so difficult to define. It refers finally to the fact that, while the oyster and the palm tree have to save their lives by law, man has to save his soul by choice."
G.K. Chesterton, “The Free Man,” in A Miscellany of Men, quoted in Gilbert! Magazine Vol. 6 #3 (December 2002)
In its annual report Freedom House had rated 81 of the world’s countries as providing a high degree of individual liberty. "It is not an accident that a majority of the citizens in 74 of those countries are Christians."
Paul Marshall, a Canadian political scientist and senior fellow with the Centre for Religious Freedom in Washington, D.C., quoted in British Columbia Report April 5, 1999