Political Quotes

“Mr. President, in 1975, Russian physicist Andrei Sakharov was awarded a Nobel Prize for his public opposition to the totalitarian communism of the Soviet Union. He knew what he was talking about as he had spent decades working on the Soviet nuclear weapons program, work he had originally thought was a patriotic duty that would ensure the balance of power with the United States but that he came to understand was in the service of a brutal, oppressive regime with aggressive intentions. The Soviets prohibited Sakharov from accepting the award in person, although his wife Yelena Bonner was abroad at the time. She accepted on his behalf and delivered his seminal speech, ``Peace, Progress, and Human Rights.'' In it, Sakharov declared: I am convinced that international confidence, mutual understanding, disarmament, and international security are inconceivable without an open society with freedom of information, freedom of conscience, the right to publish, and the right to travel and choose the country in which one wishes to live. I am likewise convinced that freedom of conscience, together with other civil rights, provides the basis for scientific progress and constitutes a guarantee that scientific advances will not be used to despoil mankind, providing the basis for economic and social progress, which in turn is a political guarantee for the possibility of an effective defense of social rights.…”