Jonathan Sacks Quotes

If I were a citizen of Russia, I would resist this communist dictatorship as vigorously as I have endeavored to resist the encroachment upon our democratic institutions in America. I hold that government of one class, denying the other classes the right to participate is tyranny.

The revolutionary government is the despotism of liberty

The world has to have zero tolerance for naked dictatorship.

The real fight isn't left or right but between forces of democracy across the spectrum and the forces of tyranny.

It is true you cannot eat freedom and you cannot power machinery with democracy. But then neither can political prisoners turn on the light in the cells of a dictatorship.

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.

No one argues that we should have imposed a dictatorship in Afghanistan having liberated the country. Similarly, we weren't about to impose a dictatorship in Iraq having liberated the country.

Sure, we could send in the troops, but the threat of communism wouldn’t diminish until the people’s standard of living was improved and the totalitarian countries of Latin America gave them more freedom.

The Chinese people are not a new kind of human nature. Human nature in China is the same as it is elsewhere. When you start in a tyrannical regime to hand out freedom there is no place to draw that line and expect that line to hold. And so it’s only a matter of time before this regime comes down

The peaceful path out of totalitarianism has never been tested.

Without political freedom there can be no other freedoms, but only an uncertain and uneasy exercise of privileges which may be terminated abruptly without anybody's having to account to those who are affected by these decisions.

The tyranny of the legislature is really the danger most to be feared.... The tyranny of the executive power will come in its turn, but at a more distant period.

We Africans continue to allow tyrannical regimes to impose themselves on us.

What the people of Zimbabwe did in almost impossible conditions was to show that you can defeat the dictator and you can defeat the dictator in peaceful, non violent peaceful change. That five minutes in the ballot box on the 29 th of March 2008 was freedom and our people used pens instead of bombs and they struck a blow at the dictator. So we have been vindicated. The people of Zimbabwe have been vindicated. Everything that we have been saying in the last 15 years that: We have a dictator; that this dictator is unpopular and that we want change - has been vindicated

We do not believe in government through the voting booth. The Spanish national will was never freely expressed through the ballot box.

The end of some of the harshest dictatorships has not necessarily spelled a more free world. The extinction of the thing we despise is not giving rise to the democracy we hoped for.

We had a revolution 2 years ago, and we see a people moving from a completely authoritarian system into a democracy. They don’t know how democracy works. They don’t know the ingredients of a democracy.

Democracy is always a threat to the powerful.

It was a transition of power, not by the ballot box…. The people who lost the election are now in power. The people who won the election are now in jail.

The Government of the absolute majority instead of the Government of the people is but the Government of the strongest interests; and when not efficiently checked, it is the most tyrannical and oppressive that can be devised

People who live in the post-totalitarian system know only too well that the question of whether one or several political parties are in power, and how these parties define and label themselves, is of far less importance than the question of whether or not it is possible to live like a human being.

Whoever wants to reach socialism by any other path than that of political democracy will inevitably arrive at conclusions that are absurd and reactionary both in the economic and the political sense.

Kings are not the only tyrants. The conduct of the long Parliament will justify in adding that the Kings are not the severest tyrants.

While the 2011 revolution did not remove the regime, it has shortened the seemingly endless patience that many Egyptians once had for military rule.

The eradication of the Muslim Brotherhood is nothing less than an abolition of democracy and a guarantee that Arabs will continue living under authoritarian and corrupt regimes.