“A revolution which aims merely at changing official policies and institutions with a view to an improvement in material conditions has little chance of genuine success.”

As I travel through my country, people often ask me how it feels to have been imprisoned in my home -first for six years, then for 19 months.

Humor is one of the best ingredients of survival.

To the best of my knowledge, no war was ever started by women. But it is women and children who have always suffered most in situations of conflict.

Some of the most relaxing weekends I have ever enjoyed were those I spent quietly with a sense of all work to date completed, and an absorbing mystery.

The relentless attempts of totalitarian regimes to prevent free thought and new ideas and the persistent assertion of their own rightness bring on them an intellectual stasis which they project on to the nation at large.

The education and empowerment of women throughout the world cannot fail to result in a more caring, tolerant, just and peaceful life for all.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognizes that ‘if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression’, human rights should be protected by the rule of law.

If you’re feeling helpless, help someone.

Please use your freedom to promote ours.

More people, especially young people, are realising that if they want change, they’ve got to go about it themselves – they can’t depend on a particular person, ie me, to do all the work. They are less easy to fool than they used to be, they now know what’s going on all over the world.

It is not easy for a people conditioned by fear under the iron rule of the principle that might is right to free themselves from the enervating miasma of fear.

The courage that dares without recognition, without the protection of media attention, is a courage that humbles and inspires and reaffirms our faith in humanity.

The important thing is fear should not control your actions. It should not dictate what you do.

I think that freedom is sometimes a state of mind. Sometimes, mind you, but not always.

I chose to walk on this journey, because I solely believed in it and wholeheartedly decided to do so, and I’m willing and able to pay for the consequences.

If I advocate cautious optimism it is not because I do not have faith in the future but because I do not want to encourage blind faith.

The authority of any governing institution must stop at its citizen’s skin.

At some point in the last 20 years, the left moved to the center, and the right moved into a mental institution.

Why shouldn’t I milk it? We’re an agricultural institution.

Laws and institutions, like clocks, must occasionally be cleaned, wound up, and set to true time.

I just wish this social institution [religion] wasnt based on what appears to me to be a monumental hoax built on an accumulation of customs and myths directed toward proving something that isnt true.

A tyrant institutionalises stupidity, but he is the first servant of his own system and the first to be installed within it.

Freedom comes from human beings, rather than from laws and institutions.

I don’t really have any interest in recording at places that are institutionalized for recording.