Lee C. Bollinger Quotes

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

My friends and family in Turkey could be arrested just for talking to me.

And why do we, who say we oppose tyranny and demand freedom of speech, allow people to go to prison and be vilified, and magazines to be closed down on the spot, for suggesting another version of history.

Being born in Cuba, a country where freedom of speech is non-existent, it's startling to observe how Venezuela, where I was happily raised, is fast becoming Cuba's mirror image: Dismantling of fundamental democratic rights deserved by its people and citizens of the world.

As I speak to you today, government censors somewhere are working furiously to erase my words from the records of history. But history itself has already condemned these tactics.

What seems fair enough against a squalid huckster of bad liquor may take on a different face, if used by a government determined to suppress political opposition under the guise of sedition

Censorship is definitely one of the main issues that you have to live with in China – period!

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

When I speak of the fear, intimidation, arrests, and public shaming of intellectuals and religious leaders who dare to speak their minds, and then I tell you that I'm from Saudi Arabia, are you surprised?

To put it in plain language, Russia is that country where the name of a writer appears not on the cover of his book, but on the door of his prison cell.

I grew up under a dictatorship. I knew what it meant for people to not have the ability to freely express themselves.

In the same way that Egypt and Libya conspired to 'disappear' my father and silence writers such as Idris Ali, they made me, too, to a far lesser extent, feel punished for speaking out.

Whenever citizens are seen routinely as enemies of their own government, writers are rountinely seen to be the most dangerous enemies.

You know what they say: When people start burning books they'll soon burn human beings.

Wherever books are burned, human beings are destined to be burned too.

Iran has a dismal record on human rights.

All the big powers they've silenced me. So much for free speech and choice on this fundamental human right.

Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings.

Libraries have had a long history of dealing with authoritarian organizations demanding reader records - who's read what - and this has led to people being rounded up and killed.

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.

The first people totalitarians destroy or silence are men of ideas and free minds.

When men are arrested without any legal basis and for political reasons, it's merely a routine, everyday occurrence in Russia, and hardly anyone has any sympathy.

Open your newspaper - any day of the week - and you will find a report from somewhere in the world of someone being imprisoned, tortured or executed because his opinions or religion are unacceptable to his government.

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.

The policy of repression of ideas cannot work and has never worked.