"There is no basis for democracy except in a dogma about the divine origin of man."
G.K. Chesterton quoted by Dale Ahlquist in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 7 # 7 (June 2004)
"As a schoolboy, I would supplement my English lessons by buying and reading The Morning Star, a foreign English-language newspaper that was available in the USSR. The Soviets permitted us to read this Communist daily published in London because, in being very critical of the democratic and capitalist world, the paper parroted the ideological line of the party. For me, however, its effect would prove highly subversive. What left a lasting impression was not the content of the criticism but the very fact that people outside the Soviet Union were free to criticize their own government without going to prison. The stronger the criticism, the more impressed I was by the degree of freedom enjoyed elsewhere."
"Preface" in Natan Sharansky with Ron Dermer The Case for Democracy
"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
In my latest National Post column I say liberal reactions to actual diversity tend to be unfavourable, suggesting that their theoretical devotion to it simply confuses debate.
“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