Juan Guaido Quotes

We have a war dictator who was not elected, he snuck in. so he punishes people that threaten him in any way, or even say something he doesn't like. It has no resemblance to democracy.

To trample democracy with one’s feet and to give power to a single man over almost eighty million people is so terrible that one can very probably tremble over the events which will come here.

Given the right conditions, any society can turn against democracy. Indeed, if history is anything to go by, all societies eventually will.

There's no checklist of how democracies fail because they fail in different ways. Some of them fail because they break up and civil war breaks out... Often they fail because someone is elected to power who doesn't respect the rules of the democracy.

The practice of arbitrary imprisonments have been, in all ages, the favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny.

If Saddam were to be replaced tomorrow he would probably be replaced with someone who's just as bad or worse than he is.

Anywhere in Latin America there is a potential threat of the pathology of caudillismo and it has to be guarded against.

If Bangladesh succumbs to the rule of one family, it would be a major step backward for the region.

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.

Before the military coup in Chile, we had the idea that military coups happen in Banana Republics, somewhere in Central America. It would never happen in Chile. Chile was such a solid democracy. And when it happened, it had brutal characteristics.

Nondemocratic regimes imperil the security of the world. They stay in power by controlling their populations. This control invariably requires an increasing amount of repression. To justify this repression and maintain internal stability, external enemies must be manufactured.

In domestic as in political tyranny, the case of absolute monsters chiefly illustrates the institution by showing that there is scarcely any horror which may not occur under it if the despot pleases

There are many democracies in our Arab and Islamic countries, but unfortunately, they are all false democracies.

Erdogon has become so paranoid, so power-hungry, he doesn't even allow institutions to flourish. It has become a one-man show.

In Belarus, the government is a kind of presidential monarchy with no checks, no balances, and no rule of law.

So benevolent, enlightened, wise dictators are the most efficient form of government. The problem is what comes afterwards, right?

Colonel Qaddafi's tyranny was absolutist, monarchical, and personal. The problem with such dictatorships is that as long as the tyrant lives, he reigns and terrorizes.

Lukashenko is very much like Trump, because democracy and Trump are incompatible things.

Mr. Modi is responsible for everyone's misery, demonetisation disaster, destruction of all democratic institutions. He is creating problems for everybody: for political leaders, for media, for corporates. He is not following any democratic values.

Tayyip Erdogan wants to go beyond George W. Bush by making critical journalism and critics in the academy illegal. What will be the difference between him and a military government? Very little. I read his remarks on the effectiveness of Adolf Hitler as Chancellor of Germany. Well, yes. But then the AKP would have to ban all other political parties, close down all critical newspapers, burn the books critical of the regime and gas the Kurds to death...the final solution of the Kurdish 'problem.' Somehow I don't think he is about to do that.

I lived in countries that had no democracy... so I don't find myself in the same luxury as you do. You grew up in freedom, and you can spit on freedom because you don't know what it is not to have freedom.

Dictatorships don't always die when the dictator leaves office.

No society has gone the way of gulags or concentration camps by following the path of Spinoza and Einstein and Jefferson and Thomas Paine

It can't happen here is always wrong: a dictatorship can happen anywhere.

Only two countries in this hemisphere are not democratic, but many countries in both Central and South America, and in the Caribbean, are really fragile democracies.