Daisaku Ikeda Quotes

Without democracy freedom is a chimera

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

Those who abhors democracy would rarely immigrate to an authoritarian state if they have to.

The deadliest foe of democracy is not autocracy but liberty frenzied.

We cannot forget the little things we take for granted in America that remain the disdain of dictators and terrorists throughout the world.

I shall stand for freedom of thought and expression in a place where it has been trampled and penalized.

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

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.

Ultimately, freedom and democracy are stronger than fear and tyranny.

Despotism can only exist in darkness, and there are too many lights now in the political firmament to permit it to remain anywhere, as it has heretofore done, almost everywhere.

We are not to expect to be translated from despotism to liberty in a featherbed.

The price of freedom is less than the cost of repression.

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

Only the history of free peoples is worth our attention; the history of men under a despotism is merely a collection of anecdotes.

You don’t go from tyranny to democracy overnight.

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.

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.

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

The revolutionary government is the despotism of liberty

Fidel Castro had to sit there while he was given a speech on democracy, something the Cuban people have not been able to hear for 43 years.

Poverty in a democracy is as much to be preferred to what is called prosperity under despots, as freedom is to slavery.

Fascism is more of a natural state than democracy. To assume blithely that we can export democracy into any country we choose can serve paradoxically to encourage more fascism at home and abroad. Democracy is a state of grace that is attained only by those countries who have a host of individuals not only ready to enjoy freedom but to undergo the heavy labor of maintaining it.

The growing tide of anti-Semitism shocks the conscious of everyone who values freedom, and the ugly, hateful acts particularly stain the character of democracies where liberty and religious freedom are supposed to be respected.

Right now, we have no possibility of politics because we have a one-party state.

I regard freedom of expression as the primary right without which one can not have a proper functioning democracy.