Mikhail Khodorkovsky Quotes

When you're in the middle of a storm, leaving your country just because you have to leave without any reasonable reason, it means you're quitting your country and this is treason.

For example, if you are a blogger who wrote something about a local official and you're going to prison for that, you're a political prisoner. If you're a businessman who has refused to cede his business to the local official and you're going to prison for that, you're not a political prisoner. In that second category there are hundreds of thousands of people in Russia.

It's quite difficult for me not to be able to return to my country, but in my country justice has been murdered.

My mother lives in Moscow, and I would like to visit her. Now she always has to travel to Finland or a Baltic country to meet me. But I have to expect that my papers would be confiscated in Moscow immediately, and that they would harass my family. I can still have more impact in the West with my books and lectures.

After the 1960 royal coup, I spent time in India - including three years in prison.

My arrest in Egypt happened in 2002, and I was convicted to five years as a political prisoner.

My links to WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden mean I am treated as a threat and can't return to the U.K.

I lost everything when they put us in prison. I was an enemy alien, a man without a country.

Granddad was deported to a Siberian prison camp at the age of 15.

When President Hassan Rouhani was elected in Iran in 2013, he welcomed back the far-flung children of Iran. But one by one, they have been arrested and imprisoned upon their return, a fate that has made me increasingly reluctant to risk going back to a homeland I've not seen since 1992.

When I was touring with my Vladimir Putin biography, which was published all over the world, people would ask me, How come you're still there, why haven't you left? I would say, I'm staying, it's my home. He can leave! It felt very good to say that. But now - he wins. It's not natural for people in the opposition to leave. It's always a personal catastrophe. And yet he's gotten people out of the country. That's the most terrifying thing about the current situation, and for the future of the country.

If you ever get twenty-five years for nothing, if you find yourself wearing four number patches on your clothes, holding your hands permanently behind your back, submitting to searches morning and evening, working until you are utterly exhausted, dragged into the cooler whenever someone denounces you, trodden deeper and deeper into the ground-from the hole you're in, the fine words of the great humanists will sound like the chatter of the well-fed and free.

I was indicted on two federal conspiracies. My wife was on the Ten Most Wanted list. That's what fascism was going to look like. That's what it did look like.

We now live in a country with a thousand political prisoners, a country where each week there are new trials, where people are put in jail because they liked something on the Internet.

No one drives me into exile, not even the nationalists.

I left Cuba when I was two years old. They took away my country, they stole the most intimate thing a human being can have. How could I forget that Fidel Castro was the person who did me so much harm?

Totalitarianism is neither left nor right, and within its empire both will perish. I was never a believer, but after seeing Czech Catholics persecuted during the Stalinist terror, I felt the deepest solidarity with them. What separated us, the belief in God, was secondary to what united us. In Prague, they hanged the Socialists and the priests. Thus a fraternity of the hanged was born.

I have on the one hand a hatred and on the other a yearning for Vienna. I left when I was nine years old because I was Jewish. And even before 1938, the anti-Semitism in Austria was probably deeper than it was in Germany or in other European countries.

The pedagogy of authoritarianism is alive and well in the United States, and its repression of public memory takes place not only through the screen culture and institutional apparatuses of conformity, but is also reproduced through a culture of fear and a carceral state that imprisons more people than any other country in the world.

In Russia an authoritarian leader is running the country. You can't fight Putin with elections because he controls them. That's why demonstrations are the most effective approach. Unfortunately Russia has sunk to this primitive level.

Opposition is dangerous to immortality.

They came to this country they, they were Hungarians, they were Communists from a Communist country. And right now those Hungarian freedom fighters can get jobs that student sit-ins can't get. They can go and sleep and live in hotels that Martin Luther King himself can't live in.They are recognized and respected because they are fighters, not because they are sit-iners or freedom.

In spite of muzzling the press, imprisoning thousands, and engaging in torture, kidnapping and murder, the Socialist government was still vulnerable to the accusation of being "soft on Basques.

Foreign countries should impose sanctions against Putin's corrupt network.