Bidzina Ivanishvili Quotes

If democracy succeeds in Egypt, other countries will follow. Should the democratic experiment in Egypt be hijacked by the military or anti-democratic Islamist groups, the revolution will fail elsewhere.

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

The list of non-democratic regimes that have seen significant reforms since 2001 is long and significant.

Political systems in the Middle East are totally dysfunctional and we are going to have to open them up.

Establishing a stable democracy is a two stage process. First you get rid of the old regime, then you build a durable democratic replacement. Because the first stage is dramatic, many people think the game is over when the dictator is gone. But the second stage is more difficult. There are many examples of broad coalitions coming together to oust dictators but relatively few of them stayed together and agreed on what a new regime should look like.

The dictatorship needs to be entirely dismantled. All the rest of the old guard must go.

Most authoritarians do not surrender power voluntarily.

Egypt is the next domino to fall and, as they say, so goes Egypt so goes the Middle East.

Two significant developments in the past several decades have been the collapse of communism as an ideology and the general acceptance, in rhetoric, if not practice, of liberal democracy.

It would be a huge mistake to abandon democracy promotion. Peaceful political change has been enormously successful in the past years in Eastern European countries as well as in countries like South Korea, South Africa, Chile and Indonesia. However, if possible, the use of force is something to avoid except in cases where genocide is threatened, like Bosnia or Libya or with regimes that threaten our security, like the Taliban and Saddam Hussein.

The Germans should be the first to sympathize with us [Egyptians]. They know how difficult it is to build a democracy following a dictatorship, and they were the first to be critical of Morsi's anti-democratic policies.

The revolution is an amalgam of former Party functionaries, quasi- democrats, KGB officers, and black-market wheeler-dealers, who are standing in power now and have represented a dirty hybrid unseen in world history

Those who regarded the revolution, during Imam Khomeini's time, as a deviation, are now [wielding] the tools of terror and oppression

The social revolution is seriously compromised if it comes through a political revolution.

The dictator can be removed in a day, but it can take years to stamp out the lingering remnants of his dictatorship

In Burma, our main goal in amending the constitution is not to phase out the military from politics. Our main point is to put the constitution in line with international standards and norms.

The regime which is destroyed by a revolution is almost always an improvement on its immediate predecessor, and experience teaches that the most critical moment for bad governments is the one which witnesses their first steps toward reform.

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.

I worry a little bit about - quote - "regime change." We haven't had a great deal of success with that in years. That's just really difficult.

For years, Taiwan has been dominated politically by a single party, the Kuomintang. People now want the place to be more democratic. They want to place more emphasis on human rights and transparency in terms of government decision-making. This is different from the way the government conducted business in the days when this was pretty much an authoritarian place.

Nothing matters for a drastic change in Ukraine more than political transformations.

In general the 53 countries on the continent of Africa have made great progress towards freedom and democracy, and in terms of electing good, sound administrations.

There is nothing more dangerous than a government of the many controlled by the few.

The Middle East has gone through periods of turmoil before. In the 1950s and 1960s, there were revolutions. When monarchies were collapsing in a number of countries, we had radicals and we had Nasserism. Today it's a little bit more complicated.

Humankind will not be free until the last Kremlin commissar is strangled with the entrails of the last Pentagon chief of staff.