Mona Eltahawy Quotes

When despots rule, cartoonists die.

I lived in a dictatorship in Brazil, and I was arrested three times. I felt in my flesh what it is to live under such a regime and experience deprivation of freedom.

He [Rafael Trujillo] had his torture chambers. He had his political assassinations. But he kept law and order, cleaned the place up, made it sanitary, built public works, and he didn’t bother the United States. So that was fine with us.

Since he took power over half a century ago, Fidel Castro proved to be a brutal dictator who must always be remembered by his gross abuses of human rights, systemic exploitation of Cubans, unrelenting repression, and stifling censorship upon his own people.

We know that Maduro's armies are riddled with persecution, torture, threats, and wrongful arrests.

Many countries persecute their own citizens and intern them in prisons or concentration camps. Oppression is becoming more and more a part of the systems.

Since Castro took power, the Cuban people have been denied basic human freedoms. No freedom of religion, no freedom of the press, no political freedom. And the regime uses brutality and violence to suppress these freedoms and impose its will.

Dictatorships do cut down on rape, and pillage, not to mention sexual harassment, by the simple expedient of sending people to labour camps for life or cutting off their hands without a trial.

Nondemocratic regimes imperil the security of the world. They stay in power by controlling their populations. This control invariably requires an increasing amount of repression. To justify this repression and maintain internal stability, external enemies must be manufactured.

Capitalism was reasonably content under Hitler, happy under Mussolini, very happy under Franco and delirious under General Pinochet

When a dictatorship controls the political life of a country, responsible opposition cannot develop, and dissent is driven underground and toward the extreme. And to draw attention away from their social and economic failures, dictators place blame on other countries and other races, and stir the hatred that leads to violence. This status quo of despotism and anger cannot be ignored or appeased, kept in a box or bought off.

Civic murder … This free republic has killed five men for their opinions.

It is a crime now in my country to talk about the government's crimes.

In the Middle East there are two methods of control: mass repression and mass bribery. In Syria they use mass repression; in Saudi Arabia, mass bribery. In Bahrain, a bit of both.

Governments whose authority is ebbing have been increasingly brazen in their attempts to silence critics.

The government that has imprisoned more journalists than any other in the world was democratically elected.

In any authoritarian society, the possessor of power dictates, and if you try and step outside, he will come after you. This is equally true of Sovietism, of China and of Iran, and in our time it has happened a lot in Islam. The point is that it's worse when the authoritarianism is supported by something supernatural.

Political leaders in Belarus are routinely repressed, and their voices are muffled: Tsikhanouskaya was running for president because her husband, Siarhei Tsikhanouski, was arrested before he could start his own presidential campaign.

When I was at university in the Fifties, Latin America was full of dictators. Trujillo was the emblematic figure because, of course, of his cruelty, corruption, extravagance, and theatricalities.

If you know anything about Ethiopia, they are very security conscious, a very closed environment. It's a repressive place were journalists and bloggers are arrested all the time.

I grew up in a dictatorship in a very Catholic country.

When I explain to people what was the situation in North Korea, they think, how can such a country exist? They know North Korea is bad in some vague way, not clearly. But when we explain it, they then wonder how can a whole country be modern-day slaves?

China is a heaven compared to North Korea.

What this man did, Fidel Castro, is he oppressed his people for nearly six decades. That legacy is firing squads. It's poverty. It's denying human rights.

When a government is in fear of dissent from its own citizens, and when its reaction is to shut out that dissent, we should all worry.