The only peace that can be made with a dictator is once that must be based on deterrence. For today, the dictator may be your friend, but tomorrow he will need you as an enemy.
Interpretation
Detente with a dictator is fragile and must be approached with caution, as allegiance can quickly shift.
This quote highlights the precarious nature of relationships with dictators, suggesting that any peace achieved is conditional and should be built on the awareness of potential future conflicts. It implies that while a dictator may appear friendly today, there is a risk of betrayal tomorrow, making the need for deterrence a crucial aspect of diplomatic engagement.
In practice
This quote could be used in a political debate about international relations with authoritarian regimes.
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.
Believe me, the drug of freedom is universally potent.
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.
It is not in giving life but in risking life that man is raised above the animal; that is why superiority has been accorded in humanity not to the sex that brings forth but to that which kills.
I do not like Moscow life. You live here not as you want to live, but as old women want you to.
For Zen students, a weed is a treasure.
Human beings are ultimately nothing but carriers-passageways- for genes. They ride us into the ground like racehorses from generation to generation. Genes don't think about what constitutes good or evil. They don't care whether we are happy or unhappy. We're just means to an end for them. The only thing they think about is what is most efficient for them.
The demands of internal growth are incomparably more important to us...than the need for any external expansion of our power.
The only certainty is that nothing is certain.
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