Bob Menendez Quotes

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.

The Iranian regime continues to violate the human rights of its own people, targeting political and civil society activists.

There's no doubt that the Chinese government is waging a full-fledged crackdown on Demosisto.

Iran has a dismal record on human rights.

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.

The trend in China is toward tighter and tighter control. They are basically improving their censorship mechanisms.

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.

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.

I lived in a dictatorship in Brazil, and I was arrested three times. I felt in my flesh what it is to live under such a regime and experience deprivation of freedom.

He [Rafael Trujillo] had his torture chambers. He had his political assassinations. But he kept law and order, cleaned the place up, made it sanitary, built public works, and he didn’t bother the United States. So that was fine with us.

Governments whose authority is ebbing have been increasingly brazen in their attempts to silence critics.

The Chinese are good at repression and can be pretty ruthless about it.

If you know anything about Ethiopia, they are very security conscious, a very closed environment. It's a repressive place were journalists and bloggers are arrested all the time.

What this man did, Fidel Castro, is he oppressed his people for nearly six decades. That legacy is firing squads. It's poverty. It's denying human rights.

Dictatorship and authentic literature are incompatible... The writer is the natural enemy of dictatorship.

Stalinism is linked with a cult of personality and massive violations of the law, with repression and camps. There is nothing like that in Russia and, I hope, will never again be.

When truth is no longer free, freedom is no longer real: the truths of the police are the truths of today.

Every terrorist regime in the world uses isolation to break people's spirits.

Bhutto's regime is remembered for having one of the worst human rights records in Pakistan's history, and her government did not allow the media freedoms she criticizes Musharraf for crushing.

Since Castro took power, the Cuban people have been denied basic human freedoms. No freedom of religion, no freedom of the press, no political freedom. And the regime uses brutality and violence to suppress these freedoms and impose its will.

The raids on Freedom House, the National Democratic Institute and International Republican Institute, the Adenauer Foundation, and other groups helping Egyptians move toward respect for democratic politics and human rights were of a piece with the practices of Hosni Mubarak - only bolder and more repressive.

Totalitarian states killed with impunity and no one was held accountable. That didn't happen in the West.

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.

The greatest threat to freedom is the absence of criticism.

The real evil of the Russian communist state is not communism. It is the secret police and the concentration camp.