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.
When we scratch the wound and give into our addictions we do not allow the wound to heal.
Looking back now, I realise that belonging to the family of a labourer actually helped to prepare my body for boxing. There were many times when my family didn't have enough food or warm clothing to go around. All this made me physically, as well as emotionally, tough.
Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps' pollution. No refuge could save the hireling and slave from the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave.
Men walk this tightrope where any sign of weakness illicits shame, and so they're afraid to make themselves vulnerable for fear of looking weak.
Hatred as an element of the struggle; a relentless hatred of the enemy, impelling us over and beyond the natural limitations that man is heir to and transforming him into an effective, violent, selective and cold killing machine. Our soldiers must be thus; a people without hatred cannot vanquish a brutal enemy.
There is not really any courage at all in attacking hoary or antiquated things, any more than in offering to fight one's grandmother. The really courageous man is he who defies tyrannies young as the morning and superstitions fresh as the first flowers. The only true free-thinker is he whose intellect is as much free from the future as from the past.
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