“Over the years, I have come to understand a critical difference between the world of fear and the world of freedom. In the former, the primary challenge is finding the inner strength to confront evil. In the latter, the primary challenge is finding the moral clarity to see evil.”
Natan Sharansky with Ron Dermer The Case for Democracy
"Human history is the history of civilizations. It is impossible to think of the development of humanity in any other terms."
Samuel Huntington The Clash of Civilizations
"The history of the earth! Doth it present anything but crimes of the most heinous nature, committed from one end of the world to the other?"
J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur. Letters from an American Farmer [prompted by American slavery].
"Dissidents understood the power of freedom because it had already transformed our own lives. It liberated us the day we stopped living in a world where ‘truth’ and ‘falsehood’ were, like everything else, the property of the State. And for the most part, this liberation did not stop when we were sentenced to prison."
Natan Sharansky with Ron Dermer The Case for Democracy
“Some of this history is very interesting, but the motive behind it is not historical. It was Columbus, and not his chambermaid, who sailed to discover America; Napoleon, and not his math teacher, who crushed Europe under his heel.”
William Gairdner, The Trouble with Democracy