I was paid to read Western economic texts. In a way, the regime paid for their own undermining.
Culture civilizes us, and that's why every single despotic regime has tried to smash [the arts].
There are, of course, all sorts of other unpleasant regimes outside the walls as well - the military dictators of Latin America and the apartheid regime of South Africa.
I will say that the prison regime is rather a good one for a writer because you have plenty of time to write.
I've always said that the Cuban regime will not change politically.
The biggest threat to the regime is information.
After a regime is removed, however, it is dangerous to leave a security vacuum.
You want to bring the Assad regime down? You have to beat the Russians and the Iranians in Syria. That is not going to happen. Like it, don't like it - it's not going to be very pleasant.
Abortion on demand is the ultimate State tyranny; the State simply declares that certain classes of human beings are not persons, and therefore not entitled to the protection of the law. The State protects the 'right' of some people to kill others, just as the courts protected the 'property rights' of slave masters in their slaves. Moreover, by this method the State achieves a goal common to all totalitarian regimes: it sets us against each other, so that our energies are spent in the struggle between State-created classes, rather than in freeing all individuals from the State.
Regimes planted by bayonets do not take root.
Osama bin Laden is going after us to get us out of the region, so he can deal with the regimes that he sees in the region, or replace them with purists.
Neoconservatives and the Pentagon have good reason to fear the return of the Vietnam Syndrome. The label intentionally suggests a disease, a weakening of the martial will, but the syndrome was actually a healthy American reaction to false White House promises of victory, the propping up of corrupt regimes, crony contracting and cover-ups of civilian casualties during the Vietnam War that are echoed today in the news from Baghdad.
The fact that oppressive and corrupt regimes can borrow money in the name of the whole country means that the country's future generations will be weighed down by interest and repayment burdens, even if the money has been frittered away in some frivolous way, embezzled or used for weapons to suppress the country's population.
If there is one thing more difficult than submitting oneself to a regime it is refraining from imposing it on other people.
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.
In the twentieth century the number of people killed by their own governments under authoritarian regimes is four times the number killed in all this century's wars combined.
So South Korean ability is very much limited to handle North Korean, you know, difficulties. So we don't want to see an immediate collapse of the North Korea regime.
The burden is on Saddam Hussein. And our policy, our national policy - not the UN policy but our national policy - is that the regime should be changed until such time as he demonstrates that it is not necessary to change the regime because the regime has changed itself.
Regime change is not within that purview. And that has been an all-out disaster.
I am no apologist for Fidel's [Castro] regime. It is, after all, a totalitarian regime. So I would like to see that change.