Slavko Docmanovic Quotes

Reformist kings can save their dynasties now by helping their countries move smoothly into democracy, or they will end their years in exile like the Russian aristocrats of a century earlier.

As a prisoner of conscience committed to peaceful transition to democracy, I urge Europe to apply economic sanctions against Ethiopia. What short-term pain may result will be compensated by long-term gain. A pledge to re-engage energetically with a democratic Ethiopia would act as a catalyst for reform.

Liberalism is but childishness, which is easily brought to reason; but revolution is a force, and one must know how to use it.

In politics experiments mean revolutions.

We launched perestroika [openness and restructuring] with our eyes open. We foresaw the complexity and the special nature of that process, realizing that it would shake up thoroughly our entire society. We were not wrong.... As for the difficulties—and they do exist—we accept them as a natural expression of contradictions inherent in a transition period.

I don't put any dates on these things. I don't say what is going to happen in one year, five years, ten years, but I am confident that the trend toward freedom in the Communist world is a basic truth.

I worry that a democratic transition in this period for a state like the U.a. E. would put, us in the throes of reactionary conservatism, probably for the next 30 or 40 years. I look at what is happening in Egypt and other places, and I wonder, do I need that kind of transition?

Government is on a collision course with the future

The foundations of society have cracked as a result of the revolutionary reforms....The definitions and boundary lines of good and evil have disappeared.

My goal for the Arab world is to change the status quo, which is horrible politically, religiously, economically, in every way.

This government will mark a rupture from the previous one, because that is the wish of the French people.

It is given to Bristol in this election to wrench the parliamentary system away from its feudal origins, and pitchfork it kicking and screaming into the twentieth century.

You can't find your way to social reform through the forces that made social reform necessary.

Those Who Slow Reforms Are Against Europe

History is full of changings of the guard—some for the better, some for the worse.

We have crossed the bridge to this transition in only 24 hours, in complete civility and complete calm. That has left the whole world surprised.

The United State can no longer allow its Arab allies to ward off democratic reform.

Compared to this [the transition] the election was easy.

The wind of change is blowing through the continent. Whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact.

From the quarrels and seditions which are often stirred up in a commonwealth, it never results that the citizens dissolve it, as often happens in the case of other associations; but only that they change its form into some other

You don’t go from tyranny to democracy overnight.

The transition from authoritarianism to democracy is not as easy as it appears in position papers – it is a rambunctious affair.

If revolution insists upon overturning established order, let other peoples make the tragic experiment. There is no place for it in America.

Constant, patient reform—the only kind of reform compatible with Democratic stability—is unsatisfying.

Nothing is so common as to see a political upheaval pass practically unnoticed merely because the names of the leaders and their parties remain the same.