Regimes Quotes

Nowhere on the planet, nowhere in history, was there a regime more vicious, more bloodthirsty, and at the same time more cunning than the Bolshevik, the self-styled Soviet regime. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The Bush administration tells us that the Iraq was was central to the Global War on Terror. Its critics call the Iraq War a distraction. The disagreement is a fundamental one. The Bush administration advocates a policy of preemption that calls for targeting terrorists and the regimes that support them, with the goal of eliminating threats before they are imminent. Their opponents disagree. The central question, then, is this: Would it have been possible to wage a serious Global War on Terror leaving the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein in power? To answer it, we must consider what we knew before September 11 and what we knew before the Iraq War. ~ Stephen F. Hayes

There is no suggestion of regime change; quite the contrary, this is an initiative to help people and to help governments who are inclined toward change. ~ Colin Powell

All governments lie, as I.F. Stone pointed out, including Israel and Hamas. But Israel engages in the kinds of jaw-dropping lies that characterize despotic and totalitarian regimes. It does not deform the truth; it inverts it. It routinely paints a picture for the outside world that is diametrically opposed to reality. And all of us reporters who have covered the occupied territories have run into Israel's Alice-in-Wonderland narratives, which we dutifully insert into our stories - required under the rules of American journalism - although we know they are untrue. ~ Chris Hedges

Everything should be done to prevent Iran, the world's most dangerous regime, from developing the world's most dangerous weapons. ~ Benjamin Netanyahu

I hope the time is not far off when I shall be able to unite all the wise and educated men of all the countries and establish a uniform regime based on the principles of the Quran which alone are true and which alone can lead men to happiness. ~ Napoleon Bonaparte

In such a regime, I say, you died a good death if your life had inspired someone to come forward and shoot your murderer in the chest-without asking to be paid. ~ Chinua Achebe

Military and absolutist regimes are undoubtedly well fitted to get the jump on an unsuspecting or unprepared enemy; but the history of modern warfare proves that they cannot win over representative governments in the long run, provided that people behind those governments have the heart to sustain initial punishment, and both the will and the resources to fight back. ~ Samuel Eliot Morison

Our greater beastliness lies not in a penchant for brute force,but in our greater corruption, nihilism, and decadence; in our servitude to the
overwhelming systems we create; in the sociopathic rationalism we adopt to master natural forces and to compete with the machines we build;and in the scientistic idolatry that co-opts the religious impulse. Of course the ancients resorted more to brute force: they lacked the infrastructure to punish their enemies and victims in a safer, more
sophisticated fashion, with advanced legal regimes and mass-produced, maximum security prisons; with engineered propaganda for social conditioning; and with economic, cyber, and drone warfare. We channel our aggression with more sophisticated instruments, but the use of those instruments doesn't ennoble us. ~ Benjamin Cain

Bourgeois existence is the regime of private affairs ... and the family is the rotten, dismal edifice in whose closets and crannies the most ignominious instincts are deposited. Mundane life proclaims the total subjugation of eroticism to privacy. ~ Walter Benjamin

As the many male victims of rape in the regime's disgusting jails can testify, this state-run pathology of sexual repression and sexual sadism is not content to degrade women only. ~ Christopher Hitchens

Regimes of racial segregation were not disestablished because of the work of leaders and presidents and legislators, but rather because of the fact that ordinary people adopted a critical stance in the way in which they perceived their relationship to reality. ~ Angela Y. Davis

There are so many different forms of silence: the silence that tyrannical states force on their citizens, stealing their memories, rewriting their histories, and imposing on them a state-sanctioned identity. Or the silence of witnesses who choose to ignore or not speak the truth, and of victims who at times become complicit in the crimes committed against them. Then there are the silences we indulge in about ourselves, our personal mythologies, the stories we impose upon our real lives. ~ Azar Nafisi

In the 20 long, hungry years between my late teens and late 30s I bought in to virtually every new diet and/or exercise regime that hoved into view, particularly at this most vulnerable time for those of us prone to poor body image - a new year. ~ Arabella Weir

First he sympathized with Cuba, then with China, and when the cruelty of their regimes began to appall him, he resigned himself with a sigh to a sea of words with no weight and no resemblance to life. ~ Milan Kundera

During Congress rule terrorism was countered effectively and firmly, whereas during the BJP regime terrorists were treated like guests and released in their own country. ~ Sonia Gandhi

To evoke another great phrase of the American revolutionary heritage - widely though inconclusively attributed to Thomas Jefferson - the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. Such a phrase is merely trite, however, unless we consider its deeper implications. For the French revolutionaries, as for so many regimes that have succeeded them across the world up to the present day, the call for vigilance against enemies, both external and internal, was the first step on the road to the loss of liberty, and lives.

Of far more significance, and the true and tragic lesson of the epic descent into The Terror, is the summons to vigilance against ourselves - that we should not assume that we are righteous, and our enemies evil; that we can see clearly, and to others are blinded by malice or folly; that we can abrogate the fragile rights of others in the name of our own certainty and all will be well regardless.

If we do not honor the message of human rights born in the revolutions of 1776 and 1786, as the French in their case most certainly failed to do, we too are on the road to The Terror. ~ David Andress

Today the reason for the Zionist regime's existence is questioned and this regime is on its way to annihilation. ~ Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

This new situation, in which "humanity" has in effect assumed the role formerly ascribed to nature or history, would mean in this context that the right to have rights, or the right of every individual to belong to humanity, should be guaranteed by humanity itself. It is by no means certain whether this is possible. For, contrary to the best-intentioned humanitarian attempts to obtain new declarations of human rights from international organizations, it should be understood that this idea transcends the present sphere of international law which still operates in terms of reciprocal agreements and treaties between sovereign states; and, for the time being, a sphere that is above the nation does not exist. Furthermore, this dilemma would by no means be eliminated by the establishment of a "world government." Such a world government is indeed within the realm of possibility, but one may suspect that in reality it might differ considerably from the version promoted by idealistic-minded organizations. The crimes against human rights, which have become a specialty of totalitarian regimes, can always be justified by the pretext that right is equivalent to being good or useful for the whole in distinction to its parts. (Hitler's motto that "Right is what is good for the German people" is only the vulgarized form of a conception of law which can be found everywhere and which in practice will remain effectual only so long as older traditions that are still effective in the constitution ~ Hannah Arendt

Revolutions are true as movements and false as regimes. ~ Maurice Merleau Ponty

Our relations with Iran have witnessed grave crises because of the policies of successive regimes in Iran which have considered Iraq and the Arab homeland, particularly the Arab Gulf area, as a sphere for domination and influence. ~ Saddam Hussein

If nothing else, all these years as a spy had taught her something important--regimes changed. Ideals changed. There was no such thing as an agency or government or political party that had only the good of the people in mind. You gave your loyalty to the right people at the right time to achieve your goal, and the rest was up for negotiation. ~ Kate Cross

The Tunisian blogger and activist Sami Ben Gharbia has written passionately about how U.S. government involvement in grassroots digital spaces can endanger those who are already vulnerable to accusations by nasty regimes of acting as foreign agents. ~ Rebecca MacKinnon

That the power regimes of heterosexism and phallogocentrism seek to augment themselves through a constant repetition of their logic, their metaphysic, and their naturalized ontologies does not imply that repetition itself ought to be stopped - as if it could be. If repetition is bound to persist as the mechanism of the cultural reproduction of identities, then the crucial question emerges: What kind of subversive repetition might call into question the regulatory practice of identity itself? ~ Judith Butler

You know, Democratic and Republican administrations alike have supported individuals and regimes that have slaughtered millions across the globe. And they need to be held accountable for that. ~ Aaron McGruder

There is an alarming increase of violence and harassment against gay people, something that is being legitimized by the regime as they brand homosexuality as something abnormal and dangerous to children. ~ Cecilia Malmstrom

Marshal Petain's Vichy regime looked like that new start. A couple of years later, it wasn't so evident that he was going to be able to protect them from German extortions, and it didn't look so much as though they had won the war, either. And so by '43, a lot of people are shifting sides. ~ Robert O. Paxton

No terror state poses a greater or more immediate threat to the security of our people and the stability of the world than the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. ~ Donald Rumsfeld

My heart goes out to the brave citizens of Syria, who each day risk and even sacrifice their lives to achieve freedom from a murderous regime. We in Israel welcome the historic struggle to forge democratic, peace-loving governments in our region. ~ Shimon Peres

When I went to Czechoslovakia under the old Communist regime one day in the '80s, I thought to myself whatever I do, whatever happens to me in Prague I'm not going to use the name Kafka, I'm just not going to do it. I won't do it; it's so easy, everyone else does, I'm not going to. I'll write the first non-Kafka mentioning piece. ~ Christopher Hitchens

Since the end of the Cold War, metropolitan elites everywhere have identified progress and modernity with the cornucopia of global capitalism, the consolidation of liberal democratic regimes and the secular ethic of consumerism. ~ Pankaj Mishra

We have an international system. We all profit from it. Trade profits from it. Peace. We can travel around the world because of it. And part of that system is certain ideas, the certain ideas you can't invade other countries for no reason. You can't commit genocide. You can't - rogue regimes can't have nuclear weapons, and you can't gas your own people. ~ David Brooks

The great powers have dominated the destiny of the Islamic countries for years and ... installed the Zionist cancerous tumor in the heart of the Islamic world ... Many of the problems facing the Muslim world are due to the existence of the Zionist regime. ~ Ali Khamenei

There are a lot of Democrats that tell me that they are just distressed over what Obama has done to the health care industry and to jobs. They are afraid to say anything about it because of recriminations, because this regime fights back. ~ Rush Limbaugh

For us, not cooperating in the monopoly regimes of intellectual property rights and patents and biodiversity - saying "no" to patents on life, and developing intellectual ideas of resistance - is very much a continuation of Gandhian satyagraha. It is, for me, keeping life free in its diversity. ~ Vandana Shiva

The promotion of human rights cannot be about exhortation alone. At times, it must be coupled with painstaking diplomacy. I know that engagement with repressive regimes lacks the satisfying purity of indignation. But I also know that sanctions without outreach
condemnation without discussion
can carry forward only a crippling status quo. No repressive regime can move down a new path unless it has the choice of an open door. ~ Barack Obama

The example given by the Nazi regime as to the ability of a modern state to destroy human lives with the same techniques used by modern industry, employing the bureaucratic apparatus readily available to any modern state, is one that can hardly be ignored. Because although history may not repeat itself, it is rare that anything introduced to human history is not used again. Whether the Holocaust was unique or not in terms of its precedents is one question; whether it will remain so is quite another. ~ Omer Bartov

Benito Mussolini had barely seized power in Italy before the Vatican made an official treaty with him ... Catholicism became the only recognized religion in Italy ... and in return urged its followers to vote for Mussolini's party. Pope Pius XI described [Mussolini] as 'a man sent by providence.' ... Across southern Europe, the church was a reliable ally in the instatement of fascist regimes ... ~ Christopher Hitchens

Confronting this regime and opposing Zionists are a national duty, as well as religious and Islamic duty, and a human duty. Even the people of Europe and America despise the Zionists. They hate them. They feel humiliated by the Zionists, who are a burden on them. ~ Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

The stability and security of authoritarian regimes cannot create but terrorism and violence and destruction. Let us accept the choice of the people. Let us not pick and choose who we would like to rule their future. ~ Wadah Khanfar

Having plenty of time and all the museum's funds at my disposal, I put myself on a regime to buy one picture a day. ~ Peggy Guggenheim

If your regime is not strong enough to handle a joke, then you have no regime. ~ Jon Stewart

My hope is that the Pope Francis visit to Cuba will remind all the Cuban citizens that they possess dignity and fundamental rights that come from God and that the Castro regime has no claim on changing what is 100% God-given. ~ Marco Rubio

One should not ascribe the evil deeds of individual leaders or political regimes to an innate fault of the Russian people and their country. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The upper hand is with those who are pushing regime change rather than those who are advocating more diplomacy. ~ Richard N. Haass

Only communist regimes have churned out more jargon than modern business. ~ Corinne Maier

She supported a deal that didn't even require this murderous regime to return a cop killer, JoAnne Chesimard, to face justice. See I know about this personally. ~ Chris Christie

I will go to the UN General Assembly and, in a clear voice, tell the nations of the world the truth about Iran's terrorist regime, which constitutes the greatest threat to world peace. ~ Benjamin Netanyahu

Advances in the technology of telecommunications have proved an unambiguous threat to totalitarian regimes everywhere. ~ Rupert Murdoch

The burden is on Saddam Hussein. And our policy, our national policy - not the UN policy but our national policy - is that the regime should be changed until such time as he demonstrates that it is not necessary to change the regime because the regime has changed itself. ~ Colin Powell

We have never said that the fight against the Iranian aggression and against the expansionist Persian tendencies (which have been demonstrated by various means under successive regimes in Iran) is the decisive battle for the Arabs. What we have said, and still say, is that the fight against Zionism is the main decisive battle for the Arabs. This is a great objective reality, which cannot be denied or underestimated except by someone who would not only harm the Arab nation and its main causes, but would also overlook the main danger. ~ Saddam Hussein

The administration often used the analogy of planting the "seeds of democracy" in the Middle East, as if they'd sprout into democratic regimes as nature took its course. Democracy doesn't sprout like apple trees. Scattering the seeds isn't enough, no matter how many soldiers do it. To continue with the gardening analogy the Bush administration seemed to love (there were also many "seeds of terror" and "seeds of hope"), democracy is more like a fragile flower that requires constant attention and the right soil. Dictatorships and fascist regimes are hardy weeds that sprout on their own. ~ Richard Engel

In the Middle East there are two kinds of regimes - those that could be worse, and those that couldn't be worse. ~ Bret Stephens

Torture continues to be practiced around the world by rogue regimes whose cruel methods match their determination to crush the human spirit. ~ George W. Bush

Bribing regimes to comply with requirements which they should have acknowledged in the first place is not a process that appeals to me. ~ Margaret Thatcher

People tend to assess the relative importance of
issues by the ease with which they are retrieved from memory - and this is
largely determined by the extent of coverage in the media. Frequently
mentioned topics populate the mind even as others slip away from
awareness. In turn, what the media choose to report corresponds to their
view of what is currently on the public's mind. It is no accident that
authoritarian regimes exert substantial pressure on independent media.
Because public interest is most easily aroused by dramatic events and by
celebrities, media feeding frenzies are common ~ Daniel Kahneman

Trying to rebuild Afghanistan on the cheap has left the country in the hands of warlords and an impotent Northern Alliance puppet regime that runs Kabul and nothing else. ~ Ted Rall

There is no doubt that the regime of Saddam Hussein possesses weapons of mass destruction. As this operation continues, those weapons will be identified, found, along with the people who have produced them and who guard them. ~ Tommy Franks

You in the West have been sold the idea that the only options in the Arab world are between authoritarian regimes and Islamic jihadists. That's obviously bogus. ~ Mohamed ElBaradei

Physicians today, as human beings, are not exempt from the perverse economic pressures created by fee-for-service regimes to see more patients for shorter appointments and order more tests and procedures. If the incentives were changed to pay to foster better health outcomes, I am convinced physician behavior would change over time. ~ Mitch Kapor

The leaders of the Pahlavi regime, in an attempt to forestall the rising tide of the Islamic revolutionary movement, were hard at work to cast doubt on the question of the Imam Khomeini's position as a Marja'a (a top religious authority) and in this way, undermine public faith in his academic, political and religious competence. ~ Yousef Saanei

When the colonizers spoke of indigenous women - ignoring their own patriarchy, which they doubtlessly considered normal, just like today - it was always with tears in their eyes. They only referred to the differences between these two patriarchical regimes - the French one and the Algerian one - at the cost of any mention of their far more considerable commonalities. ~ Christine Delphy

What was true of an ancient community of Christian believers struggling with a powerful and appealing philosophy is also true for Christians in a postmodern context. Arguments that deconstruct the regimes of truth at work in the late modern culture of global capitalism are indispensable. So also is a deeper understanding of the counterideological force of the biblical tradition. But such arguments are no guarantee that the biblical metanarrative will not be co-opted for ideological purposes of violent exclusion, nor do arguments prove the truth of the gospel. Only the nonideological, embracing, forgiving and shalom-filled life of a dynamic Christian community formed by the story of Jesus will prove the gospel to be true and render the idolatrous alternatives fundamentally implausible. ~ Brian J. Walsh

Repressive regimes do not endure change willingly - and Venezuela is no exception. ~ Leopoldo Lopez

Another example is the modern political order. Ever since the French Revolution, people throughout the world have gradually come to see both equality and individual freedom as fundamental values. Yet the two values contradict each other. Equality can be ensured only by curtailing the freedoms of those who are better off. Guaranteeing that every individual will be free to do as he wishes inevitably short-changes equality. The entire political history of the world since 1789 can be seen as a series of attempts to reconcile this contradiction. Anyone who has read a novel by Charles Dickens knows that the liberal regimes of nineteenth-century Europe gave priority to individual freedom even if it meant throwing insolvent poor families in prison and giving orphans little choice but to join schools for pickpockets. Anyone who has read a novel by Alexander Solzhenitsyn knows how Communism's egalitarian ideal produced brutal tyrannies that tried to control every aspect of daily life. ~ Yuval Noah Harari

The Cannes film festival is about big-budget films but also remarkable films made in different political regimes by film-makers with little resources. ~ Kristin Scott Thomas

You have to be strong; you have to trust yourself that you can bring down the dictatorship regime and build a new country. You have to be part of building your country. We know that anything that you dream can happen. You have to know that you have the ability to achieve your dream. ~ Tawakkol Karman

Calls for the simplification of abstract or allusive art have always come from governments suspicious of artists themselves. This is why totalitarian regimes have always legislated some form of realism. ~ Russell Smith

Under theocracies and other authoritarian regimes, the rulers are the moral authorities. Under genuine democracy some basic values are entrenched in the legal system, which is expected to be under democratic vigilance, and others are left to the person or the group, which ideally debate moral problems in a rational, free and cooperative manner. ~ Mario Bunge

But blaming Islam is a simple answer, easier and less controversial than re-examining the core political issues and grievances that resonate in much of the Muslim world: the failures of many Muslim governments and societies, some aspects of U.S. foreign policy representing intervention and dominance, Western support for authoritarian regimes, the invasion and occupation of Iraq, or support for Israel's military battles with Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon. (p. 136-137) ~ John L. Esposito

There is a great danger to the world, not only to my country [Israel] but to the United States, to the Middle East, to peace, to all of humanity, from the prospect that such regimes that brutalize its own people, that sponsors terrorism more than any other regime in the world - that this regime acquires atomic bombs is very, very dangerous. ~ Benjamin Netanyahu

The problem in Burma is the problem in Egypt, the problem you refer to in Yemen, and the problem in a lot of these countries in the world: that you can get stuck in the process of transition, in what's been called a competitive authoritarian ... a pseudo democratic regime. ~ Larry Diamond

Everywhere in the world the industrial regime tends to make the unorganized or unorganizable individual, the pauper, into the victim of a kind of human sacrifice offered to the gods of civilization. ~ Jacques Maritain

The economy in Gaza is declining because Gaza is controlled by a terror regime. ~ Ayelet Shaked

Up here in Alaska we're sitting on billions of barrels of oil. We're sitting on hundreds of trillions of cubic feet of natural gas onshore and offshore. And it seems to be only the Republicans who understand that companies should be competing for the right to tap those resources, and get that energy source flowing into these hungry markets so that we will be less reliant on foreign sources of energy. In a volatile world, relying on foreign regimes that are not friendly to Americans, asking them to ramp up resource production for our benefit, that's nonsensical. ~ Sarah Palin

The Iraqi people are living a long-running tragedy because of the legacy of the old regime, the Americans and their actions that are unsuitable for Iraqi society, and the weakness of national resolve. ~ Ahmed Chalabi

One can speak of an alterity of desire - a paradigm defined outside the tired, tacitly accepted regime, but one comes up short when attempting to posit a framework of desire beyond available, known desires. ~ Jean Baudrillard

A common error of western commentators who seek to interpret Islamism sympathetically is to view it as a form of localised resistance to globalisation. In fact, Islamism is also a universalist political project. Along with Neoliberals and Marxists, Islamists are participants in a dispute about how the world as whole is to be governed. None is ready to entertain the possibility that it should always contain a diversity of regimes. On this point, they differ from non-western traditions of thinking in India, China and Japan, which are much more restrained in making universal claims.

In their unshakeable faith that one way of living is best for all humankind, the chief protagonists in the dispute about political Islam belong to a way of thinking that is quintessentially western. As in Cold War times, we are led to believe we are locked in a clash of civilisations: the West against the rest. In truth, the ideologues of political Islam are western voices, no less than Marx or Hayek. The struggle with radical Islam is yet another western family quarrel. ~ John N. Gray

I would've a whole lot rather had Carly Fiorina over there doing our negotiation than John Kerry. Maybe we would've gotten a deal where we didn't give everything away.But the issue for us is to have a Congress that stands up and says not only no, but hell no, to this money going to a [Iran] regime that is going to use it for terror ... ~ Rick Perry

Heydrich's life therefore offers a uniquely privileged, intimate and organic perspective on some of the darkest aspects of Nazi rule, many of which are often artificially divided or treated separately in the highly specialized literature on the Third Reich: the rise of the SS and the emergence of the Nazi police state; the decision-making processes that led to the Holocaust; the interconnections between anti-Jewish and Germanization policies; and the different ways in which German occupation regimes operated across Nazi-controlled Europe. On a more personal level, it illustrates the historical circumstances under which young men from perfectly 'normal' middle-class backgrounds can become political extremists determined to use ultra-violence to implement their dystopian fantasies of radically transforming the world. ~ Robert Gerwarth

To the less privileged it was this arbitrariness that made the regime's power feel so oppressive. There were no clear principles or regulations which enabled the individual to challenge authority or the state. ~ Orlando Figes

The patriotic fervor of a population is not always in direct proportion to its well-being and the fair dealing of its government. Nationalist pride, like other variants of pride, can be a substitute for self-respect. Hence the paradox that when government policies or historical accidents make the attainment and maintenance of individual self-respect difficult, the nationalist spirit of the people becomes more ardent and extreme. The unattainability of individual self-respect is not the least factor behind the chauvinism of the populace in Fascist and Communist regimes. ~ Eric Hoffer

I'd argue, in fact, that the rise of the so-called Islamic State under Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi does somewhat vindicate Osama bin Laden's strategy and his belief that making the West intervention-weary through war would lead to a power vacuum in the Middle East and that the West would abandon its support for Arab despots, which would lead to the crumbling of despotic regimes. From the ashes of that would rise an Islamic State. Bin Laden said this eleven years ago, and it's uncanny how the Arab uprisings have turned out. ~ Maajid Nawaz

Egyptian papyri mention temple attendants who cleansed patients and implemented regimes of diet and exercise. ~ Steve Parker

What can we put into the hands of people under oppressive regimes to help them? For me, a big part of it is information, knowledge - the ability to defeat propaganda by understanding it. ~ Jimmy Wales

States like these [Iran, Iraq, North Korae], and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred. They could attack our allies or attempt to blackmail the United States. In any of these cases, the price of indifference would be catastrophic. ~ George W. Bush

The Iranian regime suppresses its own people as well as others in the region. It prevents peace by sponsoring terror globally. With the ultimate weapon that it is deceptively developing, the regime aims to gain hegemony over the entire Middle East and hold the world's economy hostage. ~ Shimon Peres

My hope is that the Chinese government will come to realise that it is futile to repress free speech, and that contrary to what they believe a regime's strength rests not its suppression of a plurality of opinions and ideas, but in its capacity and willingness to encourage them. ~ Ma Jian

i am awake only in what i love & desire to the point of terror -- everything else is just shrouded furniture, quotidian anaesthesia, shit-for-brains, sub-reptilian ennui of totalitarian regimes, banal censorship & useless pain ... ~ Hakim Bey

The more democratic and open a society is, the more it's exposed to terrorism. The more a country is free, not governed by a police regime, the more it risks hijackings or massacres like the ones that took place for many years in Italy and Germany and other parts of Europe. ~ Oriana Fallaci

The idea that we industrialized humans are immune to the natural laws that have restrained growth in other species-and humans in past social regimes-is to me so self-servingly blind as to be morally reprehensible. ~ Richard Heinberg

The aims of these shadowy 'circles' were all encompassing, 'total' in Hitler's words. 'Nothing less', in fact, 'than the elimination [Beseitigung] of those regimes', Germany and Italy most notably, 'which in their essence constitute a threat to the feudal-reactionary plutocracies.' Faced with this threat of annihilation, Hitler's time-horizon had shortened. ~ Anonymous

Dictators aren't stupid, or regimes could be toppled easily by young people mobilizing on Facebook. ~ Evgeny Morozov

Sometimes overturning brutal regimes takes time and costs lives. I wish it weren't so. I really, really do. ~ Hillary Clinton

There is also poetry written to be shouted in a square in front of an enthusiastic crowd. This occurs especially in countries where authoritarian regimes are in power. ~ Eugenio Montale

This is the conundrum of the present regimes in the Arab world. They still want to control youth; they want to be in control as they did in the 1950s and '60s. But that doesn't work anymore. Now with just a Wi-Fi link, you can understand what's happening in the world. ~ Bassem Youssef

The developed world should neither shelter nor militarily destabilize authoritarian regimes unless those regimes represent an imminent threat to the national security of other states. Developed states should instead work to create the conditions most favorable for a closed regime's safe passage through the least stable segment of the J curve however and whenever the slide toward instability comes. And developed states should minimize the risk these states pose the rest of the world as their transition toward modernity begins. ~ Ian Bremmer

Regimes planted by bayonets do not take root ... Our military strength is a prerequisite to peace, but let it be clear we maintain this strength in the hope it will never be used, for the ultimate determinant in the struggle that's now going on in the world will not be bombs and rockets but a test of wills and ideas, a trial of spiritual resolve, the values we hold, the beliefs we cherish, the ideals to which we are dedicated. ~ Ronald Reagan

Obama is hardly the first president to seek rapprochement with our adversaries and reconciliation with our enemies, of course. But his determination to make nice - even in the face of clear and repeated rejection from the other side - is unparalleled. For Obama and his team, diplomacy with rogue regimes is an end in itself, and any deal, however one-sided, is a win, especially one that the White House communications mavens think that friendly media will call a 'breakthrough' or 'historic.' ~ Stephen F. Hayes

The real problem is not in the Quran itself, but the accepted element of divine revelation that has enabled successive and rather dodgy regimes to use the Quran as an argument against freedom of speech or thought or freedom of anything. Thats the larger problem because if you walk into the global and deny freedom on the grounds that god didn't predict its evolution as a concept, then you can pretty much read a call for violence into a pingu anime or a winnie the pooh book ~ Steve Merrick