Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I stand here today on behalf of a hero of freedom and democracy in the People's Republic of China. Liu Xiaobo and his wife Liu Xia are the faces of liberty in China. They have sacrificed comfort and normalcy to chart a path toward political liberalization. For that, they have been detained, imprisoned, and abused. In 2008, Liu Xiaobo coauthored ``Charter 08,'' a manifesto that shined a light on the Communist Party of China and its totalitarian abuse of power. Though many brave souls signed their names and their fates to that document, Dr. Liu's name was at the very top. For this reason, he received the Nobel Peace Prize. He also received charges of ``inciting subversion of state power'' and an 11-year prison sentence. It is impossible to neglect the stark irony: a man dedicated to nonviolence, imprisoned for promoting peace. Motivating Dr. Liu's tremendous courage and self-sacrifice was a determination to remember what the People's Republic of China desperately wants the world to forget: Tiananmen Square. A poet, author, and political scientist, Dr. Liu was, in 1989, a visiting scholar at Columbia University, but when the pro-democracy protests broke out in Beijing in June of that year, he raced back to China to support them. He staged a hunger strike in Tiananmen Square in the midst of the historic student protests and insisted that they would remain nonviolent in the faces of the tanks, which the Chinese military deployed to smash them.…”