Believe me, the drug of freedom is universally potent.
Interpretation
Freedom is a powerful motivator and essential for human fulfillment.
Natan Sharansky's quote underscores the idea that the desire for freedom is a fundamental human longing that transcends cultures and societies. It suggests that the pursuit of freedom is invigorating and has the overwhelming ability to inspire change, empower individuals, and unite people in their quest for autonomy and self-determination.
In practice
In a speech about civil rights, one might quote this to inspire the audience.
By helping readers understand these mechanics, I hope they will appreciate why freedom is for everyone, why it is essential for our security and why the free world plays a critically important role in advancing democracy around the globe.
They tried their best to find a place where I was isolated. But all the resources of a superpower cannot isolate the man who hears a voice of freedom, a voice I heard from the very chamber of my soul.
Just as the 99% of Soviet citizens who supported the Soviet regime in 1985 was no indication of what the people inside the USSR really thought, the army of true believers that we think we see in the Arab world is an illusion.
In contrast, fear societies are societies in which dissent is banned.
My optimism is not based primarily on the successful march of democracy in recent times but rather is based on the experience of having lived in a fear society and studied the mechanics of tyranny that sustain such a society.
The two most important things that can be done to promote democracy in the world is first, to bring moral clarity back to world affairs and second, to link international policies to the advance of democracy around the globe.
Yet somehow the thing that startled me most, after a week or two had passed, was that I had in fact survived.
The courage to be is rooted in the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt.
African women in general need to know that it's OK for them to be the way they are - to see the way they are as a strength, and to be liberated from fear and from silence.
Now I am within thirty yards of him. He must fall. The gun pours out its stream of lead. Then it jams. Then it reopens fire. That jam almost saved his life.
It is something that is called MDS. It is a rare blood disorder that affects the bone marrow. I'm going to beat this. My doctors say it and my faith says it.
His whole body shakes with the strain as he tries to lift something he knows he can't lift, something everybody knows he can't lift. But, for just a second, when we hear the cement grind at our feet, we think, by golly, he might do it.
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