True individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.
Should we continue to spend billions to subsidize foreign military dictatorships, or should we concentrate on taking better care of the one we have right here at home?
Every one of the world’s dictatorships can and does claim to be acting in the name of the people.
Even a polemic has some justification if one considers that my own first poetic experiments began during a dictatorship and mark the origin of the Hermetic movement.
Look at the Paris Commune. That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.
They have been talking about a dictatorship and they were right because there’s a dictatorship and there’s a government that has been fighting that dictatorship, the dictatorship of the media.
Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.
When we overthrew Mubarak, we did this in 18 days. And because we were very naive and very unexperienced in revolutions, we thought that that was it. It is very difficult to imagine that you can actually get rid of a dictatorship that has been there for 60 years only in 18 days. So we were very naive.
I grew up in a dictatorship in a very Catholic country.
An intellectual’s weapon is writing, but sometimes people react as if it were a firearm. A writer can do a lot to change the situation, but as far as I know, no dictatorship has fallen because of a sonnet.
My husband is not American. He was born in Brazil, where he grew up under a filthy, corrupt dictatorship. In his twenties, he moved to Europe, where he lived for a while under various socialist democracies. He spent a few years on a kibbutz in Israel, living out a utopian experiment in communal existence.
Many people – when they think about North Korea and the dictatorship, or the military or nuclear weapons, nuclear missiles, those things – tend to forget ordinary citizens are living there.
Ultimately, the forces of dictatorship and extremism robbed me of my mother, but she lives on as a symbol of hope, a role model for women across the world. She proved beyond a doubt, with her life and relentless courage, that women can certainly do everything.
I never thought about becoming a politician. But during the military dictatorship, my grandfather was put in prison six times and my father twice. If my family and my country didn’t have this history, I might be a professor somewhere today.
