Political Persecution Quotes

The portrayal of Senator Joe McCarthy as a wild-eyed demagogue destroying innocent lives is sheer liberal hobgoblinism. Liberals weren't cowering in fear during the McCarthy era. They were systematically undermining the nation's ability to defend itself while waging a bellicose campaign of lies to blacken McCarthy's name. Everything you think you know about McCarthy is a hegemonic lie. Liberals denounced McCarthy because they were afraid of getting caught, so they fought back like animals to hide their own collaboration with a regime as evil as the Nazis.

Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Whenever men or women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must - at that moment - become the center of the universe.

I'm being treated like a criminal by the Polish government. It's just insane. I haven't done anything. What are they accusing me of?

Too many people have been spied upon by too many Government agencies and too much information has been collected. The Government has often undertaken the secret surveillance of citizens on the basis of their political beliefs, even when those beliefs posed no threat of violence or illegal acts on behalf of a hostile foreign power. The Government, operating primarily through secret informants, but also using other intrusive techniques such as wiretaps, microphone "bugs", surreptitious mail opening, and break-ins, has swept in vast amounts of information about the personal lives, views, and associations of American citizens. Investigations of groups deemed potentially dangerous -- and even of groups suspected of associating with potentially dangerous organizations -- have continued for decades, despite the fact that those groups did not engage in unlawful activity. Groups and individuals have been harassed and disrupted because of their political views and their lifestyles. Investigations have been based upon vague standards whose breadth made excessive collection inevitable.

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.

Fear is cruel and mean. The political reigns of terror have been reigns of madness and malignity,--a total perversion of opinion;society is upside down, and its best men are thought too bad to live.

The Rosenberg case had been orchestrated to an anti-Communist frenzy that matched the exuberant hysteria of the Nazi horror.

When the Bangladesh war happened, people in Pakistan who did not support it were called unpatriotic. My father was in the jail at that time, and a lot of those who knew my family used to call us children of a traitor.

First of all, let me just say what's interesting about American politics is that if things really get bad here, people say nasty things about you. From a global perspective, if politics get bad, you die, so let's just keep some perspective here.

I plan on suing all of the Left wing terrorists and tech tyrants who are trying to shut me down simply because I am a Conservative Jewish woman who speaks truth about Islam.

The exercise of politics is criminalized in Venezuela.

My father's family were liquidated during the Cultural Revolution in China because they were landowners. He was the only one to escape. I was born and brought up in Taiwan. But you absorb the trauma. My parents had no sense of security.

In any case, it's the cowardice of people like you who give dictators the chance to install themselves!

Cubans who arrive and can prove that they are refugees who are truly fleeing political persecution will continue to qualify as refugees. The only thing that I've asked for is to do away with automatic benefits granted to someone, basically, Cubans who come from Cuba, if it cannot be verified that they are refugees fleeing political persecution, so they will be treated the same way as any other immigrant who arrives in the United States, which is that legal immigrants in the United States don't have the right to any federal benefits for five years.

A civil libertarian today in Washington is a conservative whose friends have been indicted.

It was the stupidest thing this country ever did. He was no more a Communist than I was, and we forced him to go.

It's just not normal when one after another opposition politician ends up in jail.

The slanders poured down like Niagara. If you take into consideration the setting - the war and the revolution - and the character of the accused - revolutionary leaders of millions who were conducting their party to the sovereign power - you can say without exaggeration that July 1917 was the month of the most gigantic slander in world history.

For me, Iran was paradise, and I believe it's a paradise still, but only if you don't have political problems. If you have a political problem, paradise turns into hell.

The idea of a bowed and terrified liberal minority during McCarthy's 'reign of terror' is poppycock. Then as now, all elite opinion was against McCarthy.

In the '70s I was in exile; every time I went back I wondered if they'd take my passport away.

Again and again, I've seen Bush turn a blind eye as his henchmen have leveled zealous attacks against his political enemies - assaults which the president himself has sometimes directly encouraged.

The recently ended twentieth century was characterized by a level of human rights violations unparalleled in all of human history. In his book Death by Government, Rudolph Rummel estimates some 170 million government-caused deaths in the twentieth century. The historical evidence appears to indicate that, rather than protecting life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness of their citizens, governments must be considered the greatest threat to human security.

It’s not that Obama compromised too easily. He treated too lightly the people and forces determined to destroy him. They spat in his face and didn’t even get ticketed for a misdemeanor.

When people hear the term 'political prisoner,' especially on the Left, it becomes a kind of abstraction. Folks are aware of injustice, and they're aware that there are folks in prison who are in prison, you know, largely because of their activism.