Eleanor Roosevelt Quotes

Also, when you escape a Communist regime, you treasure liberty and you understand that as government and state expand, liberty must contract.

I believe in defending democracy by preserving democracy, not by descending to the use of the same weapons used in dictatorships, whether of the Nazi or Communist stripe.

Our liberty cannot depend on the good intention of those in power.

In any nation in which people's rights have been subordinated to the rights of the few, in any totalitarian nation, the first institution to be dismantled is the jury. I was, I am, afraid.

The chief difference [between totalitarian and free countries] is that only the totalitarians appear clearly to know how they want to achieve that result, while the free world has only its past achievements to show, being by its very nature unable to offer any detailed "plan" for further growth.

Without democracy freedom is a chimera

There is a denial of the value of the individual. Christianity affirms the value of each individual soul. Nazism denies it. The individual is sacrificed to the idol of the German Leader, German State or the German race. The ordinary citizen is allowed to hear and think only as the rulers decree.

But there is a big difference in working for the West and working for a totalitarian state.

The Cuban people still live in constant fear of a brutal totalitarian regime that has demonstrated time and again its utter disregard for basic human dignity. The fight for a free Cuba has gone on for far too long.

I have lived under totalitarian Communism, so I prize freedom as much as anyone and have long fought for freedom of conscience and speech.

I am a socialist, so I am not worried about socialism. I am worried about dictators who are putting everyone into a socialist state for their own benefit.

We see the tendency in the world to criticise democracy and sometimes even to say that authoritarian countries like China are more efficient. That is very short-sighted. China looks efficient only because it can sacrifice most people's rights. This is not something the west should be happy about.

Advocating the expansion of the powers of the state is treason to mankind

I think that democratic communities have a natural taste for freedom: left to themselves, they will seek it, cherish it, and view any privation of it with regret. But for equality, their passion is ardent, insatiable, incessant, invincible: they call for equality in freedom; and if they cannot obtain that, they still call for equality in slavery.

The tyranny of Communism is as old as the Pharaohs and the Pyramids - that the State stands above all men and their individual aspirations.

Let us never allow ourselves to think that poverty is an excuse for an invitation to totalitarianism, and if we should be tempted to think as much, let us remind ourselves that totalitarianism not only extinguishes liberty but institutionalises poverty as well

I hate extremes of any kind. Communism [seeks] the domination of the state over the individual... All my life I have stood against banning Communism or other extremist organisations because, if you do that, they go underground and it gives them an excitement that they don't get if they are allowed to pursue their policies openly. We'll beat them into the ground on argument...

The totalitarian states can do great things, but there is one thing they cannot do: they cannot give the factory-worker a rifle and tell him to take it home and keep it in his bedroom. That rifle, hanging on the wall of the working-class flat or laborer's cottage, is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there.

Whenever all men are...hastening to be slaves or tyrants we make Liberalism the prime bogey.

There's one place where (Fidel Castro’s) Cuba stands out head and shoulders above the rest – that is in its love for human rights and liberty!

But on the other hand government takes away a certain amount of liberty and in some countries it takes away all of liberty. And it will, everywhere, if people who fight government do not fight government any longer.

Our focus needs to be on freeing dissidents and continuing to support the opposition movement within Cuba - not rewarding Castro and subsidizing and strengthening his totalitarian regime.

Liberalism is totalitarianism with a human face.