Alva Myrdal Quotes

Dictatorships do cut down on rape, and pillage, not to mention sexual harassment, by the simple expedient of sending people to labour camps for life or cutting off their hands without a trial.

The guilt of Stalin and his immediate entourage before the Party and the people for the mass repressions and lawlessness they committed is enormous and unforgivable.

Bashar al-Assad's henchmen stomped on the hands of famed Syrian cartoonist Ali Farzat. Our dictators tailor wounds to suit their victims' occupations.

Iran has a dismal record on human rights.

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

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 greatest threat to the security of the people of North Korea comes from the government of North Korea.

Open your newspaper - any day of the week - and you will find a report from somewhere in the world of someone being imprisoned, tortured or executed because his opinions or religion are unacceptable to his government.

What I have experienced is nothing compared to what political prisoners in prisons suffer.

Police in China can do whatever they want; after 81 days in arbitrary detention you clearly realise that they don't have to obey their own laws. In a society like this there is no negotiation, no discussion, except to tell you that power can crush you any time they want - not only you, your whole family and all people like you.

A Committee of Investigation in South Caroline lately found a number of innocent persons in convict stockades. They were being chained, flogged and cruelly overworked

We [Arabs] export not only oil but techniques and tools of torture. Our states, run by ministries of the interior and the security services, are regimes bereft of legitimacy and based on violations of dignity and human rights.

Communism of every type and stripe brings with it an ideological straight jacket. Thought control, brain-washing, censorship, imprisonment, exile, mental and physical torture are the indispensable weapons of Communist rule.

Religious pacifists were confined in unsanitary guardhouses—sometimes in unheated cells during winter months, without blankets …. Men were … beaten, pricked or stabbed with bayonets, jerked about with ropes around their necks, threatened with summary execution, tortured by various forms of the “water cure.”

And in the general hardening of outlook that set in ... practices which had been long abandoned - imprisonment without trial, the use of war prisoners as slaves, public executions, torture to extract confessions ... and the deportation of whole populations -- not only became common again, but were tolerated and even defended by people who considered themselves enlightened and progressive

We have been tortured horribly for months in filthy Egyptian jails.

The truth that we are required to face about the slave trade is that it was founded on violence and terror … not done to Americans but done by Americans to others.

…the inflicting of pain, physical or mental, to extract confessions or statements... is widespread throughout the country.

... the Saudis have never shown any respect for human rights, either now or in the past. Even a petty burglar faces having one of his hands chopped off. The liberal press in America prefers to ignore all this, although they don't hesitate to blacken the reputation of Iran..

You agreed with the Dear Leader or you died or ended up in Camp 913.

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.

Since he took power over half a century ago, Fidel Castro proved to be a brutal dictator who must always be remembered by his gross abuses of human rights, systemic exploitation of Cubans, unrelenting repression, and stifling censorship upon his own people.

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.

When I explain to people what was the situation in North Korea, they think, how can such a country exist? They know North Korea is bad in some vague way, not clearly. But when we explain it, they then wonder how can a whole country be modern-day slaves?

The brutality against the Baloch people represents the worst form of State oppression.