Believe me, the drug of freedom is universally potent.
Natan SharanskyRead
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.
Interpretation
Freedom is crucial for everyone's security and the advancement of global democracy.
In this quote, Natan Sharansky emphasizes the interconnectedness of freedom, security, and democracy. He argues that by understanding the principles behind these concepts, individuals recognize that freedom is not just a privilege for some, but a fundamental right necessary for the safety and progress of all societies. This highlights the idea that democracy thrives when freedom is universally valued and protected.
In practice
In a speech advocating for human rights, this quote can emphasize the importance of freedom for global democracy.
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.
The two most important things that can be done to promote democracy in the world is first, to bring moral clarity back to world affairs and second, to link international policies to the advance of democracy around the globe.
I believe that the idea of the totality, the finality of the master-plan, is misguided. One should advocate a gradual transformation of public space, a metamorphic process, without relying on a hypothetical time in the future when everything will be perfect. The mistake of planners and architects is to believe that fifty years from now Alexanderplatz will be perfected. -p.197
I am ashamed every day, and more ashamed the next. But I will spend the rest of my life in this living space writing these notes, this journal, recording my acts and reflections, finding some honor, some worth at the bottom of things. I want ten thousand pages that will stop the world.
I dream of a church that is a mother and shepherdess.
To discover and know has always been a deep tendency of our nature. Can we not recognize it already in caveman?
What we make of people, and what we see in the mirror when we look at ourselves, depends on what we know of the world, what we believe to be possible, what memories we have, and whether our loyalties are to the past, the present or the future.
At the end, we're kind of observers - creative people, I mean. I feel like an observer, and I'm pretty much able to step out of things and see how things are playing out.
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