The only peace that can be made with a dictator is once that must be based on deterrence. For today, the dictator may be your friend, but tomorrow he will need you as an enemy.
Interpretation
Detente with a dictator is fragile and must be approached with caution, as allegiance can quickly shift.
This quote highlights the precarious nature of relationships with dictators, suggesting that any peace achieved is conditional and should be built on the awareness of potential future conflicts. It implies that while a dictator may appear friendly today, there is a risk of betrayal tomorrow, making the need for deterrence a crucial aspect of diplomatic engagement.
In practice
This quote could be used in a political debate about international relations with authoritarian regimes.
By helping readers understand these mechanics, I hope they will appreciate why freedom is for everyone, why it is essential for our security and why the free world plays a critically important role in advancing democracy around the globe.
Believe me, the drug of freedom is universally potent.
They tried their best to find a place where I was isolated. But all the resources of a superpower cannot isolate the man who hears a voice of freedom, a voice I heard from the very chamber of my soul.
Just as the 99% of Soviet citizens who supported the Soviet regime in 1985 was no indication of what the people inside the USSR really thought, the army of true believers that we think we see in the Arab world is an illusion.
In contrast, fear societies are societies in which dissent is banned.
My optimism is not based primarily on the successful march of democracy in recent times but rather is based on the experience of having lived in a fear society and studied the mechanics of tyranny that sustain such a society.
Animals have a much better attitude to life and death than we do. They know when their time has come. We are the ones that suffer when they pass, but it's a healing kind of grief that enables us to deal with other griefs that are not so easy to grab hold of.
There has never been a time in which I have been convinced from within myself that I am alive. You see, I have only such a fugitive awareness of things around me that I always feel they were once real and are now fleeting away. I have a constant longing, my dear sir, to catch a glimpse of things as they may have been before they show themselves to me.
In the Destroyer's steps there spring up bright creations that defy his power, and his dark path becomes a way of light to Heaven.
He that accepts protection, stipulates obedience.
When all other rights are taken away, the right of rebellion is made perfect.
In my hometown of New Orleans, grief is a public spectacle that, somewhat paradoxically, necessitates celebration. The dead are not mourned so much as they are posthumously venerated with music and dance.
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