Carlos Lopez-Cantera Quotes

In my early 20s, living in a communist regime in Romania, success to me simply meant leaving and coming to America.

I escaped from my home country, Bulgaria, to Czechoslovakia and then to the West.

My father fled from the North, hating communism.

I'm an exile. My father had the courage to leave with his wife, his mother and three children under twelve. It took more courage to leave, to sacrifice everything for freedom, than to stay.

Because if you lived, as I did, several years under Nazi totalitarianism, and then 20 years in communist totalitarianism, you would certainly realize how precious freedom is, and how easy it is to lose your freedom.

I will keep my word. My father fled Cuba, and I will fight to defend liberty because my family knows what it's like to lose it.

Having spent all that time getting away from South Africa, running away from the army, I wanted very much to believe that America and England were actually as free as they were meant to be, not slipping rapidly into becoming police states like the one I'd just left.

Because of my parents' love of democracy, we came to America after being driven twice from our home in Czechoslovakia - first by Hitler and then by Stalin.

A global government would almost by definition abusive. As someone who escaped from Communist government, how would I escape from global government.

My mother made the courageous decision to flee a tyrannized Cuba in the 1950s and bring her children to the United States, where I was born.

Churchill knew instinctively what was wrong with communism - that it repressed liberty; that it replaced individual discretion with state control; that it entailed the curtailment of democracy, and therefore that it was tyrannous.

If you are in Brazil and you grew up in a right-wing dictatorship, you think Marxism is liberating. But if you grew up in Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet Union is controlling everything and killing people, then you think capitalism is liberating. Neither of those two things are true and it doesn't take a lot brains to understand this.

I think it's an enormous blessing to be the child of an immigrant who fled oppression, because you realize how fragile liberty is and how easily it can be taken away.

My grandfather, in 1848, had fled from Germany to find political freedom in the United States.

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

Moammar Gaddafi, who has called himself the 'Guide of the First of September Great Revolution of the Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya,' should go down in history with the Emperor Bokassa and Idi Amin as a grotesque reminder of why people have the right to change their government.

I lived under the Nazis and under the Communists.

I grew up in the shadow of the Trujillato, saw how the regime had ravaged so many families.

Most Hungarians know what it was to live in a dictatorship; some are old enough to have known both fascism and communism. No one wants to go back to that.

I grew up in a socialist country. And I have seen what that does to people. There is no hope, no freedom. No pride in achievement.

There is no such thing as a liberal dictatorship, because a dictator just cannot afford to be liberal.

Foreigners being persecuted by reactionaries and exploiters can find asylum here [Cuba]. It does not matter if they speak English and were born in the United States.

We cannot forget that we are a nation founded by refugees who were fleeing oppression and often fearful for their lives.

I tell you, if I was in the same position I was in 1975, trying to leave a communist country and trying to live a free life, America is not the country that I would think about going to considering how many rights the GOP is trying to take away.

My parents fled from North Korea during the Korean War because they despised the North Korean Communist regime. They fled to seek freedom and came to South Korea.