“Political dictatorship and social hopelessness create the desperation that fuels religious extremism.”

My goal is to prove that the fundamental battle for the hearts and minds of a generation can be accomplished only under democracy.

Democracy is necessary to peace and to undermining the forces of terrorism.

Whatever my aims and agendas were, I never asked for power.

It is one thing being able to contest an election and to give the people hope that I can be the next prime minister. It is a totally different situation where the people of Pakistan are told that the results are already taken and the leader of your choice is banned.

The Orange Revolution in Ukraine is a good example of how people, who are robbed of their right to vote, can protest and put an end to dictatorship.

Democracy is the best revenge.

It’s quite difficult for me not to be able to return to my country, but in my country justice has been murdered.

Democracy needs support, and the best support for democracy comes from other democracies.

[On Richard M. Nixon:] Americans began with a president who couldn’t tell a lie and now they have one who can’t tell the truth.

The political parties have unanimously rejected the one-man constitutional changes.

Every dictator uses religion as a prop to keep himself in power.

The clerics took to the mosque saying that Pakistan had thrown itself outside the Muslim world and the Muslim umar by voting for a woman, that a woman had usurped a man’s place in the Islamic society.

Oppression does not know the meaning of provincial boundaries. Aren’t our energies better spent fighting the common enemy instead of each other?

Like all children I had taken my father for granted. Now that I had lost him, I felt an emptiness that could never be filled. But I did not let myself cry, believing as a Muslim that tears pull a spirit earthward and won’t let it be free.

The best revenge is democracy.

A people inspired by democracy, human rights and economic opportunity will turn their back decisively against extremism.

When I die, I don’t want my demise to be used as a political rally, and that’s what happened yesterday.

When I was 20, political music was the uncoolest thing on earth. But when Bush got elected, that was the first time I started actually reading the news.

I am a great believer in planning- economic, social, political, military, total world planning.

Terrorism is the intentional use of, or threat to use violence against civilians or against civilian targets, in order to attain political aims.

That by 1774 the final crisis of the constitution, brought on by political and social corruption, had been reached was, to most informed colonists, evident.

The Vice-Presidency is sort of like the last cookie on the plate. Everybody insists he won’t take it, but somebody always does.

You’re not a human till you’re in my phone book. There. My hat is now in the political ring.

What is important is that a political party articulates the mood of a generation.