Ahmed Zewail Quotes

Violence in Mexico has its origins in the lack of development and corruption.

Mexico has experimented with political change since the late 1980s.

There is a real and evident problem of democracy in Georgia, and this was the core reason of my entrance into politics. We have no rule of law. It's absolutely absent.

Venezuela has changed forever.

I only became involved in politics when democracy returned to Bolivia. Then, unluckily in democracy, we ran into the inheritance of 20 years of military government, a great deal of debt, and a great deal of expense.

The world today is anything but trouble-free.

Men like me, who merely wish to establish political freedom, will in such circumstances lose all their influence, and others will get influence who may become dangerous to all established interests whatsoever.

Albania is going through a deep crisis because it lacks the rule of law, an independent judiciary, and freedom of the media. I don't think if we stop protesting the problem is solved.

The so-called Arab Spring has proved that the fall of a Mubarak-like presidency does not mean the immediate rise of democracy. In spite of this, I am confident that Egypt will not return to an authoritarian governing system again, and that, with some time, it will achieve its democratic goals.

I see corruption as a mortal enemy for young democracies.

We believe that this is not right for a democracy to make revolutions the beacon of promoting democracy.

Given political history in Chile, it seemed to me that there was a critical task of consolidating a democracy and creating healthy civic-military and political-military relationships.

Those strutting, heroic figures who destroyed Spanish rule were, it seemed, unable themselves to rule for any significant period of time, or to build lasting institutions. Worse, the cult of personality that grew up around them served as a precedent for the two most serious evils that were to afflict Latin America until well into the late twentieth century – popular dictatorship and caudillismo, military rule – which alternated in many countries, and even sometimes merged, with doubly tragic results. Latin America’s underdevelopment since independence, particularly as compared with the United States, has been largely ascribed to such misgovernment.

Ukraine is facing a serious threat of isolation as some local political forces want to put an end to democracy and democratic reforms in the country

Where some people are very wealthy and others have nothing, the result will be either extreme democracy or absolute oligarchy, or despotism will come from either of those excesses.

I fear that some day or another we shall have in Europe a total upsetting of social order, which will drive all wise and experienced men to America.

One man’s democratization is another man’s destabilization.

Europe is filled with the very elements of social combustion.

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?

Both sides are so corrupt in Haiti that it doesn’t matter which one wins.

If reforms do not come when people are at peace, of course, they have to come through violent upheavals. No wonder the peoples who have democratic forms of government cling to them.

Poverty is a corrosive brew, capable of eating away at the underpinnings of democratic life itself.

The problem with Egypt is that there is no public trust. There is no trust, period.

The most dangerous moment for a bad government is when it begins to reform.

Democracy is an insecure landscape.