- [on airport security] If you are in my business, and I have people touching my private parts all day long, all I have to say is, 'That's what you have to do to keep us safe'.
- People forget that members of Parliament are legislators. They're not comedians. They're there to vote on stuff. But the Prime Minister's capacity to dictate House business, put together omnibus bills and ram them through, while imposing discipline, has concentrated executive power at the expense of the legislature.
- An enemy is a rival who has to be destroyed. An adversary is an opponent you want to defeat, but who you may later need as an ally. But if the House votes are along straight party lines and you have a majority, you have no incentive to treat your adversaries as anything but enemies.
- What I fear is what I think we've got: a hollowed-out democracy in which solitary politicians hurl abuse at each other in an empty chamber, and power accrues ever more steadily to the Prime Minister, to the Supreme Court, to the bureaucracy and to the press. And all of them regard those elected to represent the people with contempt and derision.
- The two states with the biggest strategic capacity to do harm to freedom in the world are Russia and China. Both are something new in the annals of political science: single party tyrannies busy perfecting crony capitalism, regimes built on corruption and privilege, where only growth keeps discontent at bay and where a middle class with precarious economic freedom chafes under restrictions to its civil and political rights.
- The challenges that lie ahead for human rights are to refuse to make everything a human rights issue and to concentrate on those central concerns of discrimination, injustice, torture and tyranny that are the movement's special cause.
- The core of human rights work is naming and shaming those who commit abuses, and pressuring governments to put the screws to abusing states. As a result, human rights conventions are unique among international law instruments in depending for their enforcement mostly on the activism of a global civil society movement.
- China now is what the Soviet system was to the human rights movement in the Cold War: its largest strategic challenge, the one regime with global reach that believes it can deny full civil and political rights in perpetuity and permanently deny its citizens access to the Internet and the information revolution. The unanswered question and unmet challenge for the contemporary human rights movement is whether the example of activists like Cheng Guangcheng will be able to do one day in China what Scharansky and his fellow human rights activists did to the Soviet system.
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