Maria Alyokhina Quotes

They didn't begin telling the truth in the Soviet Union until after it collapsed, did they?

We, the Desaparecidos, are perfectly prepared for people to hate what we're saying or not like what we're saying.

That is my major concern: writers who are in prison for writing.

Poetry is a political act because it involves telling the truth.

If I could go, I would tell the truth to the North American people. President Reagan personally ordered my visa to be denied.

Not many people were speaking truth to power in the '80s. I had a really good time doing it - I found it gratifying. It was a joy to have an opportunity to say what you believed. It's challenging to do it in fiction, but I liked writing the novels. I liked writing 'Democracy' particularly.

A state that suppresses all freedom of speech, and which by imposing the most terrible punishments, treats each and every attempt at criticism, however morally justified, and every suggestion for improvement as plotting to high treason, is a state that breaks an unwritten law.

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.

It is people's willingness to take personal risks and confront the powerful by daring to speak the truth, not the truth itself, that ultimately leads to change.

Chinese citizens have never had the right to really express their opinions; in the constitution it says you can, but in the real world it is more dangerous. In the west people think it's a right they're born with. Here it's a right given by the government, and one that's not really practised.

Our political life is closed, and our freedoms usurped, and our people are oppressed, and fearful… if you don’t say what the ruler wants, you’re exiled beyond the sun.

Don’t let religious authorities decide what can or can't be published, …. free speech is vital for democracy, for social change, for the possibility of challenging what has been laid down by established authorities…. freedom only for those who do not offend, annoy, and irritate entrenched authorities - is no freedom at all.

It is a crime now in my country to talk about the government's crimes.

Be alert that dictators have always played on the natural human tendency to blame others and to oversimplify. And don't regard yourself as a guardian of freedom unless you respect and preserve the rights of people you disagree with to free, public, unhampered Expression

There are no political prisoners, only imprisoned politicians.

The more a government strives to curtail freedom of speech, the more obstinately is it resisted; not indeed by the avaricious, ... but by those whom good education, sound morality, and virtue have rendered more free. Men in general are so constituted that there is nothing they will endure with so little patience as that views which they believe to be true should be counted crimes against the laws.

Speaking truth to power is never going to be easy.

Telling the truth - telling thoughtful truths - should not be a revolutionary act. Speaking truths to power should not be sacrificial, but they are.

In the 20th century, imprisonment of writers practically comes with the territory.

Political leaders in Belarus are routinely repressed, and their voices are muffled: Tsikhanouskaya was running for president because her husband, Siarhei Tsikhanouski, was arrested before he could start his own presidential campaign.

I was shocked when I heard that Farghadani had been sentenced to 12 years and nine months in prison on spurious charges, as Amnesty International notes, of 'spreading propaganda against the system,' 'insulting members of the parliament through paintings' and 'insulting the Supreme Leader' with her cartoon.

I think that for many of us, the years of the Civil Rights movements - Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy running for president in 1968 to end the war and so forth - these were defining moment in terms of trying to hold government accountable and have a level of responsibility and truth-telling.

Who is it that said that 'you have not converted a man because you have silenced him?' This is true of the use of the military on people.

How a man who holds the entire population of a country as his prisoners, and punishes the families of those who escape, can be admired by people who call themselves liberals is one of the many wonders of the human mind's ability to rationalize. Yet such is the case with Fidel Castro.

We have to have Internet streaming with truth out there. We have to have folks who are peacefully protesting, telling the truth. And the heart of America will begin to melt in the face of truth and charity.