Political Prisoner Quotes

As soon as I got out of jail, as soon as my trial was over, first of all, during the time I was in jail, there was an organization called the National United Committee to Free Angela Davis, and I insisted that it be called National United Committee to Free Angela Davis and All Political Prisoners. ~ Angela Davis

As our country bled ... its leader's wife came to this podium piously to call for a new human order, this when thousands of Filipinos were political prisoners. ~ Corazon Aquino

What good is it to be rich if we canna scrape up the scratch to buy a political prisoner on a whim? ~ Kresley Cole

When I got out of prison, I was basically no longer human,' Miriam says. ~ Anna Funder

A political prisoner is someone who is out fighting for his or her people's rights and freedom and is imprisoned for that alone. ~ Leonard Peltier

From long familiarity, we know what honor is. It is what enables the individual to do right in the face of complacency and cowardice. It is what enables the soldier to die alone, the political prisoner to resist, the singer to sing her song, hardly appreciated, on a side street. ~ Mark Helprin

Due to the fact that I experienced personally the situation of a political prisoner, I have an historical commitment to all those that were or are prisoners just because they expressed their views, their public opinion, their own opinions. ~ Dilma Rousseff

I would like you to understand completely, also emotionally, that I'm a political detainee and will be a political prisoner, that I have nothing now or in the future to be ashamed of in this situation. That, at bottom, I myself have in a certain sense asked for this detention and this sentence, because I've always refused to change my opinion, for which I would be willing to give my life and not just remain in prison. That therefore I can only be tranquil and content with myself. ~ Antonio Gramsci

Stewart, with the help of his incredibly astute staff, was combining reporting with commentary, pointing a finger at stupidity and hollowness, and devising a creative hand grenade. All of it had political purpose and direction. It wasn't strictly ideological, although he's obviously left of center. And he was fearless, not in the sense that anybody was going to make him a political prisoner. But he punched up. He punched up, and the shots landed.

I don't think the world is any more absurd now than it's ever been, or more tragic, or more beautiful. But Jon took advantage of these new ways of seeing the world and took out his magic marker and drew circles around the idiocy. He set out to be a working comedian, and he ended up an invaluable patriot. He wants his country to be better, more decent, and to think harder.

~ DAVID REMNICK, editor in chief, the New Yorker ~ Chris Smith

Nobody wants a political prisoner, but a political emigrant is no problem. ~ Alexei Navalny

Among those people lucky enough, if you will, to have actually been brought to trial as a political prisoner, several historians have said there has not been one acquittal since the Bolshevik Revolution. ~ Barbara Amiel

Are you a political prisoner, Dooley?"
Her blue eyes, immense now in her gaunt face, turned a pitying gaze on the reporter who'd asked her this. "Yes," she said. "And so are you. ~ Sigrid Nunez

Freedom is a choice, and we have to defend our choices. ~ Vahid Asghari

For the first 3 weeks of that month, I was also under internal segregation. This simply meant that no other political prisoner was allowed near me. During meals, I was made to sit apart from the others, often with a guard between us. During my ration of sunshine, I had to sit in my corner, often with a watchful guard to ensure that there was no talking or other contact between me & any of the others. Because we were all on the same block it wasn't easy for the warders to enforce total segregation. The other political prisoners would break through the cordon by shouting across to me or by finding any & every excuse for going past where I was sitting & hurriedly throwing in one or two words of solidarity...This was always touching coming from people who were in no better conditions. ~ Ngugi Wa Thiongo

My arrest in Egypt happened in 2002, and I was convicted to five years as a political prisoner. ~ Maajid Nawaz

Just saw a t-shirt at the gym said, body by torture. That's a lot less ironic if you're a political prisoner in the Middle East. ~ Dov Davidoff

As far as those kinds of things, I also played at the concert to call for the release of Nelson Mandela when he was a political prisoner in South Africa. We were celebrating his 70th birthday and calling for his release. ~ Jackson Browne

There are also hunger strikes. Hunger strikes are noble and sometimes necessary. If you're a political prisoner in China or North Korea (where the entire country is on a hunger strike, not by choice), I get it. For you, it's life or death. But at Harvard, it's about a press clipping and maybe getting a better grade or a higher class of hand job. So when an undergrad adopts a hunger strike in order to get someone to divest from oil, I say, let the twerp starve. Most of them are overfed, pudgy masses of soft tissue - it wouldn't hurt if these sad sacks lost a few pounds. They might even understand the plight of the average Venezuelan, who operates under conditions American activists see as utopian, when they're really nightmarish. How about the next time one of our coeds feels a hunger strike coming on, we exchange her with someone who's genuinely starving? ~ Greg Gutfeld

Secular theorists often assume they know what a religious argument is like: they present it as a crude prescription from God, backed up with threat of hellfire, derived from general or particular revelation, and they contrast it with the elegant complexity of a philosophical argument by Rawls (say) or Dworkin. With this image in mind, they think it obvious that religious argument should be excluded from public life ... But those who have bothered to make themselves familiar with existing religious-based arguments in modern political theory know that this is mostly a travesty . 13 ~ Edward Feser

In this enlightened age, there are few I believe, but what will acknowledge, that slavery as an institution is a moral & political evil in any country. It is useless to expatiate on its disadvantages. ~ Robert E.Lee

Men never fail to dwell on maternity as a disqualification for the possession of many civil and political rights. Suggest the idea of women having a voice in making laws and administering the Government in the halls of legislation, in Congress, or the British Parliament, and men will declaim at once on the disabilities of maternity in a sneering contemptuous way, as if the office of motherhood was undignified and did not comport with the highest public offices in church and state. It is vain that we point them to Queen Victoria, who has carefully reared a large family, while considering and signing ... ~ Elizabeth Cady Stanton

I'm particularly committed to the political people who needed defense. I understand that they're fighting a bigger war than just, "Let me go get some money for cocaine tonight." ~ Lynne Stewart

The big story today, Barack Obama was accused of insulting Sarah Palin when he criticized Republican policies by saying, you can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig. Political experts say that if Obama keeps insulting Palin, he could lose the election and win a job at MSNBC. ~ Conan O'Brien

History should be to the political economist a wellspring of experience and wisdom. ~ Edward Gibbon

I've always seen my campaigns against corruption as political work of a purer form than what opposition leaders usually do. All they do is hold roundtables and release political statements, which is all well and good. But there are concrete things that need to get done in order to achieve the basic goal of every opposition politician. ~ Alexei Navalny

For years many in the oil-rich states argued that their enormous wealth would bring modernizations. They pointed to the impressive appetites of Saudis and Kuwaitis for things Western, from McDonald's hamburgers to Rolex watches to Cadillac limousines. but importing Western good is easy; importing the inner stuffing of modern society - a free market, political parties, accountability, the rule of law - is difficult and even dangerous for the ruling elites ~ Fareed Zakaria

The public discourse on global warming has little in common with the standards of scientific discourse. Rather, it is part of political discourse where comments are made to secure the political base and frighten the opposition rather than to illuminate issues. In political discourse, information is to be 'spun' to reinforce pre-existing beliefs, and to discourage opposition. ~ Richard Lindzen

This metropolitan world, then, is a world where flesh and blood is less real than paper and ink and celluloid. It is a world where the great masses of people, unable to have direct contact with more satisfying means of living, take life vicariously, as readers, spectators, passive observers: a world where people watch shadow-heroes and heroines in order to forget their own clumsiness or coldness in love, where they behold brutal men crushing out life in a strike riot, a wrestling ring or a military assault, while they lack the nerve even to resist the petty tyranny of their immediate boss: where they hysterically cheer the flag of their political state, and in their neighborhood, their trades union, their church, fail to perform the most elementary duties of citizenship.
Living thus, year in and year out, at second hand, remote from the nature that is outside them and no less remote from the nature within, handicapped as lovers and as parents by the routine of the metropolis and by the constant specter of insecurity and death that hovers over its bold towers and shadowed streets - living thus the mass of inhabitants remain in a state bordering on the pathological. They become victims of phantasms, fears, obsessions, which bind them to ancestral patterns of behavior. ~ Lewis Mumford

So many idealistic political movements for a better world have ended in mass-murdering dictatorships. Giving leaders enough power to create 'social justice' is giving them enough power to destroy all justice, all freedom, and all human dignity. ~ Thomas Sowell

History is, after all, something that happened to people. No 'force' whether economic or political can act except as it acts through the minds and bodies of human beings. ~ Priscilla Smith Robertson

Mary Matalin and James Carville have given me more hope when it comes to love and relationships than any romance book or chick flick ever. ~ Meghan McCain

We all say in our own lives that money isn't everything. Love matters, friendships matter. My relationship with my kids matters. It shouldn't be a giant leap to take that thought and introduce it into political dialogue ~ David Cameron

The political world was anathema; its activists, both retro and progressive, seemed wrongheaded and dreamy. The revolutionaries, armed or peaceful, had no notion of what should happen after they "won." Who would rule? The "people"? Please. What did that mean? The best outcome would be to introduce a new idea into the population that perhaps a politician would act on. The rest was theater seeking an audience. Wealth alone explained humanity's evil, and he was determined to live without deference to it. ~ Toni Morrison

The fault of this country is the want of measure in political life. Flat acquiescence in illegality, followed by sanguinary reaction - that, senores, is not the way to a stable and prosperous future. ~ Joseph Conrad

Until comparatively recently in its history, Maycomb County was so cut off from the rest of the nation that some of its citizens, unaware of the South's political predilections over the past ninety years, still voted Republican. ~ Harper Lee

When most major Protestant denominations have their annual councils, assemblies, or conventions, they make pronouncements on matters having to do with disarmament, federal aid to education, birth control, the United Nations, and any number of social and political issues. Very rarely are any resolutions passed that have to do with the
redemptive witness of the Gospel. ~ Billy Graham

Libertarianism is a theory of politics that is so compelling that once you have absorbed it, it becomes the lens through which you end up understanding all economic and political events. ~ Llewellyn Rockwell

It continues to startle me, the range of political ideologies that are compatible with enthusiasm for spaceflight. Tax-and-spend liberals of the Great Society stripe, obviously - but also spending-slashing Tea Partiers, hippie peaceniks, fierce libertarians, military loyalists, and apathetics of every shade. So very many of us seem to feel that a love of human spaceflight is reconcilable with our beliefs, and we can all explain why. ~ Margaret Lazarus Dean

Hindsight history, sometimes call counterfactual history, is usually not history at all, but most often a condescending game of oneupmanship in which the living play political tricks on the dead, who are not around to defend themselves. ~ Joseph J. Ellis

For a man of my generation, our century has been a long intellectual and political struggle in favor of freedom. ~ Octavio Paz

Revolutions are the only political events which confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning. ~ Hannah Arendt

Americans will not and should not respond to a political creed that cherishes the past solely because it offers an excuse for shutting out the hard facts and difficult tasks of the present. ~ Nelson Rockefeller

I cannot ... perceive any ground for hoping that any practical good would, while the funding system exists in its present extent, result from the adoption of any of those projects, which have professed to have in view what is called Parliamentary Reform ... when the funding system, from whatever cause, shall cease to operate upon civil and political liberty, there will be no need of projects for parliamentary reform. The parliament will, as far as shall be necessary, then reform itself. ~ William Cobbett

Most men think that in framing their political opinions they are actuated by desire for the public good; but 9 times out of 10 a man's politics can be predicted from the way in which he makes a living. This has led some people to maintain, and many more to believe practically, that in such matters it is impossible to be objective, and that no method is possible except a tug-of-war between classes with opposite bias. ~ Bertrand Russell

It's really a pity that there are observers who view political events like comic strips. There has to be a Zorro, there has to be a star. No, the problem of Upper Volta is more serious than that. It was a grave mistake to have looked for a man, a star, at all costs, to the point of creating one, that is, to the point of attributing the ownership of the event to captain Sankara, who must have been the brains, etc. ~ Thomas Sankara

Of our political revolution of '76, we all are justly proud. It has given us a degree of political freedom, far exceeding that of any other nation of the earth. In it the world has found a solution of the long mooted problem, as to the capability of man to govern himself. In it was the germ which has vegetated, and still is to grow and expand into the universal liberty of mankind. ~ Abraham Lincoln

Will his work survive? Alas, I worry that it will not. As an American liberal with impeccable credentials, I would like to say that political correctness is going to kill American liberalism if it is not fought to the death by people like me for the dangers it represents to free speech, to the exchange of ideas, to openheartedness, or to the spirit of art itself. Political correctness has a stranglehold on academia, on feminism, and on the media. It is a form of both madness and maggotry, and has already silenced the voices of writers like James Dicky across the land. ~ Pat Conroy

They, the lawmakers, were hoodwinked by the insurance companies who are still funding the national tort reform movement, a political crusade that has been wildly successful. Virtually every state has fallen in line with caps on damages and other laws designed to keep folks away from the courthouse. So far, no one has seen a decline in insurance rates. An investigative report by my pal at the Chronicle revealed that 90 percent of our legislators took campaign money from the insurance industry. And this is considered a democracy. ~ John Grisham

The political nature of man made it highly unlikely that a society designed to meet regularly would remain peaceable. "The way to make friends quarrel is to pit them in disputation under the public eye," Jefferson said. ~ Jon Meacham

I have a different idea of what bravery is."
"What-complaisance?"
"In a sense. Acceptance, resiliency. How strong must one be to throw a temper tantrum?"
"Is that what you'd call this? You and your people storm our homeland, take us all prisoner and any form of resistance is a temper tantrum in your eyes?"
He pondered this for a moment, his freckled nose crinkling.
"Yes. ~ Cayla Kluver

It's too low, and if Europe wants to be a force in the world it needs to be more than a moral and political and economic force, which Europe is because it shares many of our values and demonstrates them around the world. But it has to have the military power that goes with that as well. ~ Ashton Carter