Barbara Amiel Quotes

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.

You agreed with the Dear Leader or you died or ended up in Camp 913.

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.

I hate Iran. I hate the Iranian government. It's a cruel and evil government.

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.

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.

Every kind and degree of evil of which mankind are susceptible may be inflicted on them by their government.

When despots rule, cartoonists die.

Every dictatorship creates thousands of smaller dictators who live on for decades.

There is a terrible price the U. S. Government must pay when it associates itself … intimately with a repressive regime.

Bashar al-Assad's henchmen stomped on the hands of famed Syrian cartoonist Ali Farzat. Our dictators tailor wounds to suit their victims' occupations.

Colonel Qaddafi's tyranny was absolutist, monarchical, and personal. The problem with such dictatorships is that as long as the tyrant lives, he reigns and terrorizes.

Kim Jong-un's style is more suggestive of Saddam Hussein or his murderous son, Uday Hussein.

We have a war dictator who was not elected, he snuck in. so he punishes people that threaten him in any way, or even say something he doesn't like. It has no resemblance to democracy.

Every one of the world's dictatorships can and does claim to be acting in the name of the people.

Dictators cause the world's worst problems: all the collapsed states, and all the devastated economies. All the vapid cases of corruption, grand theft, and naked plunder of the treasury are caused by dictators, leaving in their wake trails of wanton destruction, horrendous carnage and human debris.

History reminds us that dictators and despots arise during times of severe economic crisis.

I've played so many historical characters because most horrible dictators are short, fat, middle-aged men.

Dictators free themselves, but they enslave the people.

In Iran, there is no freedom of the press, no freedom of speech, no independent judiciary, no free elections. There is no freedom of religion - not even for Shiites, who are forced by Iran's theocracy to adhere to one narrow set of official rules.

Every Arab 'republic' has been a republic of fear, but only Saddam Hussein's Iraq surpassed the Assads' Syria in number of victims.

Dictators are interesting, no?

A state that suppresses all freedom of speech, and which by imposing the most terrible punishments, treats each and every attempt at criticism, however morally justified, and every suggestion for improvement as plotting to high treason, is a state that breaks an unwritten law.

What I have experienced is nothing compared to what political prisoners in prisons suffer.

Dictators must have enemies. They must have internal enemies to justify their secret police and external enemies to justify their military forces.