Benny Tai (1964) Hong Kong activist and writer
April 23, 2018 Free speech fears as Beijing attacks Hong Kong professor https://www.ft.com/content/02439b1e-3efb-11e8-b7e0-52972418fec4
I Am Running for President in Turkey. From My Prison Cell. (2018)
Benny Tai (1964) Hong Kong activist and writer
April 23, 2018 Free speech fears as Beijing attacks Hong Kong professor https://www.ft.com/content/02439b1e-3efb-11e8-b7e0-52972418fec4
Selahattin Demirtaş (1973) Turkish Kurdish politician
I Am Running for President in Turkey. From My Prison Cell. (2018)
Selahattin Demirtaş (1973) Turkish Kurdish politician
I Am Running for President in Turkey. From My Prison Cell. (2018)
Tigran Sargsyan (1960) Economist, politician
Message on Armenian Genocide Victims Remembrance Day (24 April 2010) http://www.gov.am/en/speeches/1/item/3001/. <br class="br">2010
Fethullah Gülen (1941) Turkish preacher, former imam, writer, and political figure
"Fethullah Gulen: I Condemn All Threats to Turkey’s Democracy", 2016
“The future of our country depends on our educational institutions. They will be kept democratic.”
Aurelia Henry Reinhardt (1877–1948) American educator and social activist
In [Henry Reinhardt, Aurelia, "Keep Our Colleges Democratic" Plea of Noted Woman Educator, https://cdnc.ucr.edu/cgi-bin/cdnc?a=d&d=MM19200423.2.22&srpos=4&e=-------en--20--1--txt-txIN-Aurelia+Henry+Reinhardt-ILLUSTRATION------1, 3 July 2018, Madera Mercury, April 23, 1920]
Abd al-Karim Qasim (1914–1963) Prime Minister of Iraq
The historical extempore speech at the Reserve Officers' College (1959)
“Kosovo and Taiwan, as two democratic countries, will fight against authoritarianism side by side.”
Source: Blerta Deliu-Kodra (2021) cited in " Taiwan, Kosovo parliamentary groups formed to boost bilateral ties https://focustaiwan.tw/politics/202112210007" on Focus Taiwan, 21 December 2021.
George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States
2010s, 2017, Speech at "Spirit of Liberty: At Home, In the World" event (2017)
Andrei Sakharov (1921–1989) Soviet nuclear physicist and human rights activist
Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom (1968)
Context: Intellectual freedom is essential to human society — freedom to obtain and distribute information, freedom for open-minded and unfearing debate, and freedom from pressure by officialdom and prejudices. Such a trinity of freedom of thought is the only guarantee against an infection of people by mass myths, which, in the hands of treacherous hypocrites and demagogues, can be transformed into bloody dictatorship. Freedom of thought is the only guarantee of the feasibility of a scientific democratic approach to politics, economy, and culture.
But freedom of thought is under a triple threat in modern society—from the deliberate opium of mass culture, from cowardly, egotistic, and philistine ideologies, and from the ossified dogmatism of a bureaucratic oligarchy and its favorite weapon, ideological censorship. Therefore, freedom of thought requires the defense of all thinking and honest people.