Scott McClellan Quotes

Growing up under Saddam's rule, I witnessed many injustices occurring everyday in my country and yet I could not do anything to prevent them.

How a man who holds the entire population of a country as his prisoners, and punishes the families of those who escape, can be admired by people who call themselves liberals is one of the many wonders of the human mind's ability to rationalize. Yet such is the case with Fidel Castro.

A country that goes out of its way to imprison the innocent has no business preaching democracy to the world.

The West has political prisoners.

One prisoner of conscience is one too many.

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.

There's a lot of hypocrisy and condescension in Israel's institutionalized support for Mubarak's tyrannical rule, in its backing of a corrupt leader who established a brutal secret police state to suppress his citizens and keep their mouths shut.

I understand my mother and father and sister are in Turkey, but if I stop talking, who is going to speak for the thousands and thousands of innocent people in jail?

As you look at me and listen to me, please remember the often repeated truth that one prisoner of conscience is one too many.

There are several dozen political prisoners in Russia. When I cite that number people are often very surprised. They often think there are more. Well - there are hundreds of thousands of people who haven't had a fair trial, who are victims of the political system. But in the Amnesty International sense of the word, most of them are not political prisoners because they are not going to prison for protesting.

One can have great concern for the people of Ethiopia, but it's another thing to inflict daily torture on the people of England.

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.

As our country bled . . . its leader's wife came to this podium piously to call for a new human order, this when thousands of Filipinos were political prisoners.

I think I was the healthiest prisoner of conscience in the world.

A lot of prophets have gone to jail.

You see, Africa makes a fool of our idea of justice. It makes a farce of our idea of equality. It mocks our pieties. It doubts our concern. It questions our commitment. Because there is no way we can look at what's happening in Africa, and if we're honest, conclude that it would ever be allowed to happen anywhere else.

There are nations, where people live in captivity, fear and silence. I believe, one day from prison camps and torture cells and from exile the leaders of freedom will emerge. The world should stand with those oppressed people until the day of their freedom finally arrives.

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

They can send us to prison, but they cannot silence us. The truth cannot be silenced.

Our political life is closed, and our freedoms usurped, and our people are oppressed, and fearful… if you don’t say what the ruler wants, you’re exiled beyond the sun.

We were proclaiming ourselves political hypocrites before the world by thus fostering human slavery and proclaiming ourselves, at the same time, the sole friends of human freedom.

These servants of the mighty czar are a lazy, over-bearing, cruel lot of vagabonds, who treat the outcast with the same scorn and severity they themselves receive from their superiors. It is their duty to bring so many heads alive to designated places and to account for the lost as being dead. Before leaving a poor wretch on the way, the officer in charge assures himself of the utter uselessness of attempting to take the worn-out prisoner farther. Only when absolutely beyond human aid is she or he left to the mercy of the fierce and hungry wolves

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

It is much to be wished that slavery may be abolished. The honor of the States, as well as justice and humanity, in my opinion, loudly call upon them to emancipate these unhappy people. To contend for our own liberty, and to deny that blessing to others, involves an inconsistency not to be excused.

The Spaniards have served us with rapine and death. They have violated the sacred rights of human beings, violated capitulations and the most solemn treaties; committed, in fact, every crime. They have reduced the Republic of Venezuela to the most frightful desolation. Thus, then, justice demands vengeance and necessity obliges us to take it