Eskinder Nega Quotes

Mexico has experimented with political change since the late 1980s.

It is going to take a long time to switch Egypt into a democracy.

It is given to Bristol in this election to wrench the parliamentary system away from its feudal origins, and pitchfork it kicking and screaming into the twentieth century.

We have a devastated city and devastated souls ... The transition from communism to democracy proved to be a bomb that blew us up.

The United State can no longer allow its Arab allies to ward off democratic reform.

Don't worry about Yemen. Yemen started in peace, and it will end its revolution in peace, and it will start its new civil state with peace.

We urge all democratic nations and the United Nations to answer the Iraqi Governing Council's call for support for the people of Iraq in making the transition to democracy.

Reformist kings can save their dynasties now by helping their countries move smoothly into democracy, or they will end their years in exile like the Russian aristocrats of a century earlier.

It is true that Egypt's attempt at democracy after the 2011 revolution encountered many obstacles in governance and infrastructure.

A genuinely democratic Iraq might well act as a fresh spur.

Support for peaceful reform by the people themselves is the right way to promote democracy, not the use of force.

For politics to change … culture must change too --- and that takes much more than dispatching troops, holding elections, and writing constitutions.

We’ve reformed our representative democracy into the past.

My goal for the Arab world is to change the status quo, which is horrible politically, religiously, economically, in every way.

This government will mark a rupture from the previous one, because that is the wish of the French people.

Those Who Slow Reforms Are Against Europe

Reforms are less to be dreaded than revolutions, for they cause less reaction.

We launched perestroika [openness and restructuring] with our eyes open. We foresaw the complexity and the special nature of that process, realizing that it would shake up thoroughly our entire society. We were not wrong.... As for the difficulties—and they do exist—we accept them as a natural expression of contradictions inherent in a transition period.

We have crossed the bridge to this transition in only 24 hours, in complete civility and complete calm. That has left the whole world surprised.

The wind of change is blowing through the continent. Whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact.

You don’t go from tyranny to democracy overnight.

Constant, patient reform—the only kind of reform compatible with Democratic stability—is unsatisfying.

There is nothing in our government that the ballot cannot remove or amend. It can make and unmake presidents and congresses and courts.... It can sweep over trusts, syndicates, corporations, monopolies and every other development of the money power.

We in South Africa had a relatively peaceful transition. If our madness could end as it did, it must be possible to do the same everywhere else in the world. If peace could come to South Africa, surely it can come to the Holy Land.

We are on the our way to a free market economy. Regardless of the mistakes and omissions, the government has managed to implement a firm and consistent economic policy. Regardless of how incomplete it still is, the transition to free market relations and democracy has become irreversible.