Evgeny Morozov Quotes

The Arab Spring is over. The days of the protesters with laptops and BlackBerrys in Tahrir Square are long gone.

Civil movements and riots are as old as human civilization. Long before Twitter was created, mobilization of the discontented was mouth-to-mouth, or even by 'smoke signals' to gather the uprising against established political power.

If you look not just at the Arab Spring, but at what I call the 'Youth Spring' that has started in Europe, young people are starting to find a voice, and they are not looking to the traditional media to reflect that.

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.

When thinking about the fall of any dictatorship, one should have no illusions that the whole system comes to an end like a bad dream… A dictatorship leaves behind itself an empty fields on which the tree of thought won’t grow quickly. It is not always the best people who emerge from hiding.

The more brutal the dictator, the harder to oust.

When Tunisians overthrew Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in 29 days and Egyptians Hosni Mubarak in 18 days, it was an appropriate rebuke to dictators and Bin Laden.

Young people have been at the forefront of every great social movement in our country's history.

If Egypt were going to change, it is going to change through the young people.

You can bring down governments, you can do a lot of things that are in your own interests even though liberals will get very antsy when you start talking about it.

The old bastions of the post-communist regime collapsed before my very eyes. The monsters who had kept Ukraine in a criminal state left the stage.

The Arab Spring showed that people are not going to wait for an American president to make good on his big talk about democracy and human rights; they are going to fight for those rights themselves and overthrow pro-American dictators who stand in their way.

When dictatorship is a fact, revolution becomes a right.

Revolution may not be pro-Western or democratic.

None of us is certain about the outcome of the Arab Spring.

Moammar Gaddafi, who has called himself the 'Guide of the First of September Great Revolution of the Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya,' should go down in history with the Emperor Bokassa and Idi Amin as a grotesque reminder of why people have the right to change their government.

The Egyptian experience suggests that social media can greatly accelerate the death of already dying authoritarian regimes.

The Arab Awakening or Arab Spring has transformed the geopolitical landscape.

When an upstart dictator in the United States (Franklin Delano Roosevelt) succeeds in making this a one-party form of government, when the ballot is useless, I shall have the courage to stand up and advocate the use of bullets.

Not one rebel or many rebels can change a government by force.

When you have an autocratic regime you have no guarantee that the regime will last beyond the autocrat.

Some in the West have long argued that because of the lack of a viable liberal alternative, supporting authoritarian regimes in Arab countries is the only political choice against the Islamists. Now, in Tunisia, as people flood into the streets demanding democracy, we see that this is not the case. It was not the case in Iran in 1979 either, but the West was so invested in the Shah that it failed to strongly back the liberal opposition. We don't have to repeat that error today.

When citizens have no political way to deal with revolution, they become counter-revolutionary.

In every Revolution a dictator is needed to save the state by force, or censors to save it by virtue.

A dictator is often a revolutionary who has made a name for himself. A revolutionary is often a bourgeois who hasn't.