Mikhail Baryshnikov Quotes

Also, when you escape a Communist regime, you treasure liberty and you understand that as government and state expand, liberty must contract.

Ever since I took to the streets when I was 17 to protest at great personal risk against the communist dictatorship, I have been a passionate democrat.

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.

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

From behind the Iron Curtain, there are signs that tyranny is in trouble and reminders that its structure is as brittle as its surface is hard.

What if democracy does not serve liberty? This question is seldom asked in the West, where democracy is often seen as synonymous with liberalism.

The crisis of democracy in the West is not the result of falling in love with another system. In Europe and America people who are disillusioned with democracy do not dream about the Chinese model or any other form of authoritarian rule. They do not dream about government that controls Internet and puts in prison those daring to disagree.

Because Iranians have had to fight so long and painfully for political freedom, they have a deep appreciation for its value - perhaps deeper than many in the West who take their electoral rights for granted.

A political prisoner is someone who is out fighting for his or her people's rights and freedom and is imprisoned for that alone.

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.

When I die, my only wish is that Cambodia remain Cambodia and belong to the West. It is over for communism, and I want to stress that.

Let this circumstance of our constitution therefore be directed to this noble purpose, and then all the objections urged against it by jealous tyranny and affrighted superstition will vanish.

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 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.

Communist countries consider all people, even their own, as secondary and only of value as they serve the state. Nevertheless those of us who live in democratic countries are always shocked and angered by the apparent indifference that a Communist regime has for what happens to individuals

In the United States, we can do almost anything we want. It's not like Egypt, where you're going to get murdered by the security forces.

There's a serious and worrying return to the fall of democracy in Spain, and it's not just us who are realising that.

Beyond the barricades we long to see a Hong Kong free from tyranny and a puppet government.

My duty is to call for free elections because there is an abuse of power, and we live in a dictatorship.

How can we later criticise other countries outside the European Union for adopting such measures to repress opponents when we are tolerating this inside the European Union with European citizens? Like me - I'm a European citizen.

Whereas Canada and our allies see the rule of law, freedom of speech, and fair elections as the guardrails to a more secure world, Beijing sees them as a threat to the rule of the Communist Party.

The most interesting stuff happens when an authoritarian government removes itself a little and gives this margin of freedom. And then art is grabbed with both hands.

That is our dilemma in Poland. We don't like to be ruled by the East.

I grew up as a discriminated minority in a dictatorship, so obviously the issue of human rights is a matter of concern for me.

We should therefore be opposed to institutional barriers to that freedom: Military dictatorships, for example. Or states run by a Central Committee.