Ian Brown Quotes

I was imprisoned for talking.

I had to grow up in prison for something I did not do.

If Mumia Abu-Jamal has nothing important to say, why are so many powerful people trying to shut him up?

One prisoner of conscience is one too many.

The man dies in all who keep silent in the face of tyranny.

But why shouldn't I speak out? Don't you speak out in this country?

Alas, how many have been persecuted for the wrong of having been right?

It troubled me that we had these reports of torture of detainees, we had people jailed at Guantanamo Bay who couldn't even talk to their lawyers and couldn't see the evidence against them - sort of fundamental bedrock civil liberties things.

When people hear the term 'political prisoner,' especially on the Left, it becomes a kind of abstraction. Folks are aware of injustice, and they're aware that there are folks in prison who are in prison, you know, largely because of their activism.

I have the responsibility to tell everybody that I am not the only political prisoner in Hong Kong and that there will be more coming.

I understand my mother and father and sister are in Turkey, but if I stop talking, who is going to speak for the thousands and thousands of innocent people in jail?

I am not a politician in prison, I am a political prisoner who uses jail to denounce Spain's human rights violations.

While the Governor, and the Mayor, and countless officers of the Commonwealth are at large, the champions of liberty are imprisoned.

As you look at me and listen to me, please remember the often repeated truth that one prisoner of conscience is one too many.

There is no democracy without dissent.

They wanna censor me, they ratha see me in a cell, livin' in hell, with only a few of us to live to tell.

As a life-long liberal who has engaged in protests against the government and for civil rights, I am saddened at efforts by some of my fellow liberals to silence commencement speakers with whom they might disagree on some issues.

Shake any institution of higher learning, and a dozen boycotters will fall out of it.

I think of protest as confrontation and disruption, as the end of silence.

For years, decades, the system has taught us to stay quiet. They've made us believe that those who take to the streets to speak up are crazy, criminals, troublemakers.

Every fair-minded person holding a position of authority must support the few who have stood up against the injustice being perpetrated in the name of blasphemy.

Keep calling out injustices around you.

The only weapon that we have in our hands this evening is the weapon of protest. That's all.

I cannot keep quiet even when I am a lone voice.

I know of only one country, at least to my knowledge, which has a dissident culture where leading figures, I mean, the most famous writers, journalists, academics and so on, are not only critical of state policy, but are constantly carrying out civil disobedience and risking imprisonment and often being imprisoned, standing up for people's rights. That's Turkey.