For hundreds of millions of people, the fall of the Berlin Wall was a great triumph: The moment marked the end of hated dictatorships and the beginning of a better era. But for the KGB officers stationed in Dresden, the political revolutions of 1989 marked the end of their empire and the beginning of an era of humiliation.
Anne Applebaum
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.
Barbara Amiel
Only a free West can help the prisoners of today's left- and right-wing dictatorships.
The Holy Book calls upon Muslims to resist tyranny. Dictatorships in Pakistan, however long, have, therefore, always collapsed in the face of this spirit.
Benazir Bhutto
When the United States aligns with dictatorships and totalitarian regimes, it compromises the basic democratic principles of its foundation - namely, life, liberty and justice for all.
So I think we should stay focused on the real problem in the Middle East. It's not Israel. It's these dictatorships that are developing nuclear weapons with the specific goal of wiping Israel away.
Benjamin Netanyahu
The poets who have written the best poems about war seem to be the poets whose countries have experienced an invasion or vicious dictatorships.
Billy Collins
A Trump presidency - neutral between dictatorships and democracies, opposed to free trade, skeptical of traditional U.S. defense alliances, hostile to immigration - would mark the collapse of the entire architecture of the U.S.-led post-World War II global order.
Bret Stephens
The United States condoned dictatorships in Latin America for much of the 20th century.
Carlos Fuentes
Nigerian politics has been, since the military dictatorships, largely non-ideological. Rather than a battle of ideas, it is about who can pump in the most money and buy the most access.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Oil could complicate domestic politics in countries with too much of it - there is a reason economists talk about 'the curse of oil,' and dictatorships have thrived in countries with abundant natural resources.
Chrystia Freeland
I sing against emotional dictatorships, and against the imposition of one person over another, in the name of love.
Concha Buika
When the United States was founded, the very idea of a nation premised on democratic principles of freedom and tolerance was viewed by the vast majority of the world as an experiment doomed to fail. Dictatorships, monarchies, and theocracies had for many centuries ruled the world.
Eliot Spitzer
There are examples of fraternal dictatorships, or one, anyway: the passing of power from Fidel to Raul Castro.
Elliott Abrams
True individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
If Greece had gone through a very normal political life, I may have not been in politics. But just the fact that I lived through huge upheavals and very difficult struggles and polarization and the barbarism of dictatorships - that made me feel that we had to change this country.
George Papandreou
Every one of the world's dictatorships can and does claim to be acting in the name of the people.
Harold H. Greene
I hate war... for the dictatorships it puts in the place of democracies, and for the starvation that stalks after it.
Harry Emerson Fosdick
We must learn, and especially we Germans, that resistance is not only possible and allowed in dictatorships. There is resistance that man must perform every day.
Heinrich Boll
Political dictatorships take possession not just of money and belongings but of narrative.
Hisham Matar
I came from two harsh dictatorships, Nazi and Stalinist. I never thought of becoming a writer as such, yet in a lucid moment, I recognised what I had to do.
Democracies, unlike dictatorships, are forgiving and generous, but they cannot survive unless they fight.
I've made the comment that democracies work slower than dictatorships. That's a true thing.
Look, I don't think President Obama would have bowed to the ruler of Saudi Arabia if he didn't have oil to the degree that the Saudis do. I think they and other producing states, almost all of whom, except Norway and Canada, are dictatorships or autocratic systems, have thrown their weight around because of oil.
When it comes to racism, discrimination, corruption, public lies, dictatorships, and human rights, you have to take a stand as a reporter because I think our responsibility as journalist is to confront those who are abusing power.
This is how dictatorships always behave: they deny reality; they deny crises.
During the Cold War, tensions between the West and the Soviet Union affected virtually all countries worldwide. As a result, throughout Latin America, guerrilla groups emerged, seeking to destabilize military dictatorships and attain democracy, freedom, and policy reform - goals that they believed could not be achieved peacefully.
It is vital to speak up in a democracy. Otherwise we are living in dictatorships.
For those of us in the opposition movement under dictatorships, part of our job is confronting police and spending time in prison. So, a dissident not only needs to learn how to oppose oppression but also how to face the crackdowns and time in prison.
North Korea has taught a great lesson to all the countries in the world, especially the rogue countries of dictatorships or whatever: if you don't want to be invaded by America, get some nuclear weapons.
The president feels not only do we need to change these rogue regimes, but even our friendly allies, who really basically have, sort of, benign dictatorships, need to get with the program if they want to have long-term security and prosperity from terrorism.
Italy in the 1920s, Germany in the '30s, East Germany in the '50s, Czechoslovakia in the '60s, the Latin American dictatorships in the '70s, China in the '80s and '90s - all dictatorships and would-be dictators target newspapers and journalists.
All I want for 2019 is for much-loved pop stars to stop being inadvertent propagandists for mass-murdering dictatorships.
Should we continue to spend billions to subsidize foreign military dictatorships, or should we concentrate on taking better care of the one we have right here at home?
In our modern age - in the age of free information - I don't think there is any place for dictatorships.
Dictatorships start wars because they need external enemies to exert internal control over their own people.
I'm not a prophet, but I always thought it was natural for dictatorships to fall. I remember in 1989, two months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, had you said it was going to happen no one would have believed you. The system seemed powerful and unbreakable. Suddenly overnight it blew away like dust.
There is a disturbing reincarnation of socialist and nationalist dictatorships raising their heads around the world and even in our own back yard. You see it in places like Venezuela and Bolivia, stoked in no small part by Cuba, and also in Central Asia, and troubling trends in Russia and China.
Colonel Qaddafi's tyranny was absolutist, monarchical, and personal. The problem with such dictatorships is that as long as the tyrant lives, he reigns and terrorizes.
The patchwork political landscape of the Arab world - the client monarchies, degenerated nationalist dictatorships, and the imperial petrol stations known as the Gulf states - was the outcome of an intensive experience of Anglo-French colonialism.
I am the product of living in dictatorships. And someone who's lived in dictatorships and not being allowed to be themselves, it cherishes the ability to be yourself and to have feelings and to speak them when asked. And I am that person.
We have to implant democracies where there are now dictatorships.
It serves notice that President Bush is serious about promoting freedom, because free societies are a lot more peaceable than dictatorships and monarchies.
Nigeria shed the last of a succession of brutal military dictatorships in 1997 and adopted a democratic form of government only in 1999. Our elections of 2003, 2007, and 2011 were complicated and fraught with tension, but each one has shown remarkable progress.
History proves that all dictatorships, all authoritarian forms of government are transient. Only democratic systems are not transient. Whatever the shortcomings, mankind has not devised anything superior.
