Whatever the immediate gains and losses, the dangers to our safety arising from political suppression are always greater than the dangers to the safety resulting from political freedom. Suppression is always foolish. Freedom is always wise.
My grandfather, in 1848, had fled from Germany to find political freedom in the United States.
Economic freedom cannot be sacrificed if political freedom is to be preserved.
For as long as I can remember, I've always been interested in issues of social justice, political freedom, and civil rights.
As I tell young people in workshops, 'It's your country. If you came here on the bottom of a slave ship, if your people came here seeking political freedom - however your folks got here - it belongs to you just as much as it belongs to anyone, so claim it. It's your birthright. America belongs to every person who is here.'
The American political scientist Francis Fukuyama has argued that liberal democracies, with their political freedom and economic success, have three important pillars: a strong government, the rule of law, and democratic accountability. I would add a fourth: free markets.
Political freedom is to be cherished indeed. But there is no political freedom that is not indissolubly bound to the inner personal freedom of the individuals who make up that nation: no liberty of a nation of conformists, no free nation made up of robots.
The appeal of conservatism is the mutuality it asserts between individual and political freedom, its beautiful idea of a free man in a free society. And it offers minorities the one thing they can never get from liberalism: human rather than racial dignity.
Because Iranians have had to fight so long and painfully for political freedom, they have a deep appreciation for its value - perhaps deeper than many in the West who take their electoral rights for granted.
I fight, and have fought, for political freedom, for justice and for fairness and freedom of speech.
