“Trump is the first anti-democratic president in modern U.S. history.”

I once experimented with meditation, cleared my mind, and immediately remembered a phone call I had to make; that was that.

The conservatives saw the Fascist leader as someone they could hide behind, manipulate, and, when convenient, replace.

Good guys don’t always win, especially when they are divided and less determined than their adversaries. The desire for liberty may be ingrained in every human breast, but so is the potential for complacency, confusion, and cowardice. And losing has a price.

Well, the thing that I learned as a diplomat is that human relations ultimately make a huge difference.

Repeat a lie often enough and it begins to sound as if it must—or at least might—be so.

How can one be bored in a world where a billion examples of human ingenuity, peculiarity, pigheadedness, and compassion are on regular view?

This was how twentieth-century Fascism began: with a magnetic leader exploiting widespread dissatisfaction by promising all things.

The real question is: who has the responsibility to uphold human rights? The answer to that is: everyone.

The real question is: who has the responsibility to uphold human rights? The answer to that is: everyone.

It took me quite a long time to develop a voice, and now that I have it, I am not going to be silent.

Hate, emotionalism, and frustration are not policies.

It took me quite a long time to develop a voice, and now that I have it, I am not going to be silent.

This is the first rule of deception: repeated often enough, almost any statement, story, or smear can start to sound plausible. The Internet should be an ally of freedom and a gateway to knowledge; in some cases, it is neither.

Decades ago, George Orwell suggested that the best one-word description of a Fascist was bully.

The more extreme advocates from one side helped to validate the arguments of extremists on the other.

The magic of America is that we’re a free and open society with a mixed population. Part of our security is our freedom.

To my mind, there is a solution which has to do with democracy, because democratic governments are subject to the will of the people. So, if the people will it, you can actually create international institutions through the democratic states.

The real safeguard of democracy is education.

Campaign promises are – by long democratic tradition – the least binding form of human commitment.

All democracies turn into dictatorships – but not by coup. The people give their democracy to a dictator, whether it’s Julius Caesar or Napoleon or Adolf Hitler. Ultimately, the general population goes along with the idea.

The virtue of a democratic system with a [constitutionally guaranteed right to free speech] is that it readily enables the people, over time, to be persuaded that what they took for granted is not so, and to change their laws accordingly.

If we care about universal principles such as freedom, democracy and the rule of law, we cannot leave them to the care of market forces; we must establish some other institutions to safeguard them.

[If critics of the Pledge of Allegiance persuaded the public it should be changed] then we could eliminate under God from the Pledge of Allegiance, that could be democratically done.

Democracy without God is mans worship and elevation of himself and his own intelligence or humanism, where man becomes his own measure for morality, judgment, and justice.