Bernard Levin Quotes

Poverty in a democracy is as much to be preferred to what is called prosperity under despots, as freedom is to slavery.

I think that democratic communities have a natural taste for freedom: left to themselves, they will seek it, cherish it, and view any privation of it with regret. But for equality, their passion is ardent, insatiable, incessant, invincible: they call for equality in freedom; and if they cannot obtain that, they still call for equality in slavery.

In any nation in which people's rights have been subordinated to the rights of the few, in any totalitarian nation, the first institution to be dismantled is the jury. I was, I am, afraid.

Without democracy freedom is a chimera

You can't put civil rights on the ballot.

I have lived under totalitarian Communism, so I prize freedom as much as anyone and have long fought for freedom of conscience and speech.

Freedom and justice cannot be parceled out in pieces to suit political convenience. I don't believe you can stand for freedom for one group of people and deny it to others.

For most of the world, civil and political rights... come as luxuries that are far away in the future.

I have said democracy and freedom do not work too well if you are hungry, if you are starving.

I believe in defending democracy by preserving democracy, not by descending to the use of the same weapons used in dictatorships, whether of the Nazi or Communist stripe.

Communist countries consider all people, even their own, as secondary and only of value as they serve the state. Nevertheless those of us who live in democratic countries are always shocked and angered by the apparent indifference that a Communist regime has for what happens to individuals

Our liberty cannot depend on the good intention of those in power.

Wars are bred by poverty and oppression. Continued peace is possible only in a relatively free and prosperous world.

Liberty is impossible if 36 thousand families at the top of the economic pyramid get as much income as 12 million families at the bottom.

It's not mainland China that rubs me up the wrong way, it is the dictatorship that rubs me up the wrong way. It's the freedom that we Chinese people are not allowed that rubs me up the wrong way.

Whatever I read about Emergency as a part and process of my film, I can say, as a citizen of a democratic country called India, I am certainly not 'for' Emergency, a decision that snatched away the normalcy of human life for 21 months.

Prosperity without freedom is just another form of poverty.

America must remain freedom's staunchest friend, for freedom is our best ally and it is the world's only hope to conquer poverty and preserve peace.

Anti-democracy...is a virus that exists, and pro-democracy is the antibody to that virus, and I think we have to become vigilant, and we have to stay on top of the issues of democracy and freedom.

We speak here of the challenge of the dichotomies of war and peace, violence and non-violence, racism and human dignity, oppression and repression and liberty and human rights, poverty and freedom from want.

America stands for freedom, liberty and justice for all. And it's not happening for all right now.

What stands if freedom fall?

Whenever all men are...hastening to be slaves or tyrants we make Liberalism the prime bogey.

If a nation wishes, it can have both free elections and slavery.

Today they say that we are free, only to be chained in poverty.