Regime Quotes

#1. Countries such as the U.S. and Britain have taken it upon themselves to decide for us in the developing world, even to interfere in our domestic affairs and to bring about what they call regime change.

Robert Mugabe

#2. The euro is a hybrid of a fixed exchange-rate regime, like the 1980s ERM or the 1930s gold standard, and a state currency.

Yanis Varoufakis

#3. In 2008, Putin's message was, 'We aren't like a Central Asian republic, we aren't going to build a personalistic regime, we will have institutions.' This is all abolished now. The very idea of a governing party and party career, as you have in China, that didn't work.

Ivan Krastev

#4. Assad's regime helped ISIS grow by attacking other opposition forces and rarely targeting ISIS.

Richard Engel

#5. I am very interested in Ayurvedic medicine and hope to explore it more someday. I only have a very superficial understanding of the whole thing right now. But learning what my body type is has shifted my whole self-care regime a bit, and I feel better because of it.

Taylor Schilling

#6. The problem in Burma is the problem in Egypt, the problem you refer to in Yemen, and the problem in a lot of these countries in the world: that you can get stuck in the process of transition, in what's been called a competitive authoritarian ... a pseudo democratic regime.

Larry Diamond

#7. Time and time again, the obstinate refusal of the tsarist regime to concede reforms turned what should have been a political problem into a revolutionary crisis ... the tsarist regime's downfall was not inevitable; but its own stupidity made it so.

Orlando Figes

#8. It is not far-fetched to draw a line from Operation Ajax through the Shah's repressive regime and the Islamic Revolution to the fireballs that engulfed the World Trade Center in New York.

Stephen Kinzer

#9. We lived by very complex import and export policies, a very complex industrial licensing regime. Very few people could get licences, which were required right from manufacturing a pin to manufacturing a car, and generally went to people who found favour with the government.

Sunil Mittal

#10. The fact that the American government has formally set aside an enormous yearly budget of nearly $75 million to increase cultural exchanges in order to bring about what it calls "regime change" has muddied the waters and complicated American Studies in Iran more than anything else.

Mohammad Marandi

#11. The corruption in Iraq has nothing to do with ideas - it has to do with the regime and institutional structures and power.

Elliott Colla

#12. If it all just happens like this for the rest of my life, it's going to be one endless Groundhog Day. I determined that I was not prepared to submit to this regime, so I thought I had to do something about it.

Bruce Dickinson

#13. I left Motown because of the regime of people who were there.

Smokey Robinson

#14. There is nothing called as cheap patents. Anything cheap is not worthwhile.

Kalyan C. Kankanala

#15. Saddam Hussein's regime is a gray and gathering danger.

George W. Bush

#16. Every terrorist regime in the world uses isolation to break people's spirits.

Bell Hooks

#17. But it is important to observe that when Europe or the United Nations impose sanctions that are supposed to be aimed against a certain regime, usually generally millions of people end up being directly punished.

Omar Bongo

#18. Desert Storm II would be in a walk in the park ... The case for 'regime change' boils down to the huge benefits and modest costs of liberating Iraq.

Kenneth Adelman

#19. So South Korean ability is very much limited to handle North Korean, you know, difficulties. So we don't want to see an immediate collapse of the North Korea regime.

Kim Dae-jung

#20. The Iraqi regime was supporting terrorist cells all over the world. We had to expel three Iraqi diplomats from the Philippines because of evidence that they were either in touch with Abu Sayyaf or doing their own espionage.

Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo

#21. It was President [Bill] Clinton and the United States congress in 1998 which said that the regime has to be changed because the regime would not give up its weapons of mass destruction. We came into office in 2001 and kept that policy because Saddam Hussein had not changed.

Colin Powell

#22. A temporary coalition of anger against the old regime was no basis for a stable government.

Charles Emmerson

#23. I think if the copyright regime focuses on the people we are supposed to be helping, the artists and creators, and builds a system that gives them the freedom to choose and to protect and to be rewarded for their creativity, then we will have the right focus.

Lawrence Lessig

#24. Until genuine political, economic, and cultural liberty are established, democracy is unlikely to offer anything more than a simulacrum of legitimacy for an oppressive regime.

David Harsanyi

#25. The old bastions of the post-communist regime collapsed before my very eyes. The monsters who had kept Ukraine in a criminal state left the stage.

Yulia Tymoshenko

#26. From now on, in any place, if any nation or any group confronts the Zionist regime, we will endorse and we will help. We have no fear expressing this ... The Zionist regime is a cancerous tumor that must be removed, and God willing it will be.

Ali Khamenei

#27. Nineteen-seventy-nine had been a year of American setbacks around the globe. Before the year began, Cuban troops were already roaming Angola, and a pro-Communist regime ruled Ethiopia.

Elliott Abrams

#28. Iran's arms exports to the murderous Assad regime in Syria are of particular concern. As the Panel of Experts has concluded, Syria is now the central party to illicit Iranian arms transfers.

Susan Rice

#29. As far as the regime is concerned, well, the play is sheer terror for them. Because they feel, How dare - how dare anybody lift his or her voice in criticism against us? We have the guns. Their level of paranoia and power-drunkenness is unbelievable.

Wole Soyinka

#30. Those people who say that words have no power know nothing of the nature of words. Words, well placed, can end a regime; can turn affection to hatred; can start a religion or even a war. Words are the shepherds of lies; they lead the best of us to the slaughter.

Joanne Harris

#31. I have real fears for Cuba based on the South American experience. Where you have had such a stern regime, as Fidel's [Castro], there is no culture of politics.

John Gimlette

#32. The notion that we would condition Iran not getting nuclear weapons in a verifiable deal on Iran recognizing Israel is really akin to saying that we won't sign a deal unless the nature of the Iranian regime completely transforms. And that is, I think, a fundamental misjudgment.

Barack Obama

#33. The brutal regime of the dictator fell ... the regime that ruled Iraq for decades, the decades of darkness. The decades that were of tyranny.

Jalal Talabani

#34. [Even if the U.S. doesn't attack] Saddam Hussein is not going to survive. His regime is on the verge of implosion.

Christopher Hitchens

#35. I've been eating tons of organic foods, staying away from processed sugars, white flours, and anything artificial. It's the same as my normal regime, but I'm being even stricter, because everything I put into my body is literally building this precious baby inside me.

Danica McKellar

#36. I personally am not a total pacifist. I do believe there is such a thing as a just war. I believe, for instance, the effort to destroy the Nazi regime militarily was justified military action.

Marianne Williamson

#37. I don't think the current regime of South Korea will deal actively with the issue of North Korean defectors.

Kim Young-sam

#38. The strength of the regime came from its ability to isolate its own citizens completely.

Barbara Demick

#39. The army did what Milosevic's regime asked of it, which was to create a 'Greater Serbia'.

Stjepan Mesic

#40. The Israeli regime is a tool in the hands of Zionists to control the Middle-East and the entire world.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

#41. One of the regime's most important tactics is the creation of a third force in the country.

Joe Slovo

#42. So that in 1974, when I graduated as a lawyer, I figured I'm not going to be a lawyer under a military regime.

Ruben Blades

#43. Mo Yan is the Chinese equivalent of the Soviet Russian apparatchik writer Mikhail Sholokhov: a patsy of the regime.

Salman Rushdie

#44. China is the most repressive censorship regime on the Internet.

John Palfrey

#45. China's critics rightly condemn the government for controlling public opinion in all sorts of ways, from imprisoning dissidents to censoring internet discussions. Yet the regime's obsession with control paradoxically means it pays close attention to public opinion.

Anonymous

#46. And for any agents or proxy of the regime interested in asking me questions face to face, I've got some bullets slathered in pork fat to make you feel extra special welcome.

Eric S. Raymond

#47. Mubarak was so paranoid that anyone he perceived as competent became a threat to him.

Wael Ghonim

#48. Nobody should claim that the war [in Iraq] is over. But certainly it can be said that the regime is finished.

John Howard

#49. The only question which concerns us here is whether these "educated" persons are actually equipped to face the ordeal before them or unconsciously contribute to their own undoing by perpetuating the regime of the oppressor.

Carter G. Woodson

#50. We have millions and millions of North Korean children totally stunted in mind and body and will have to be dealt with at some point, who have been raised to believe that they live in a regime that is run by a god.

Christopher Hitchens

#51. The Kurdish people welcome the no-fly zone protection, contrary to the Iraqi regime that is against it.

Jalal Talabani

#52. Out of regime change you get chaos. From the chaos you have seen repeatedly the rise of radical Islam. So we get this profession of, oh, my goodness, they want to do something about terrorism and yet they're the problem because they allow terrorism to arise out of that chaos.

Rand Paul

#53. Saddam, as most tyrants, was a total control freak. He wanted total control of his regime. Total control of the country. And to introduce a wild card like Al Qaeda in any sense was just something he would not do.

Bob Simon

#54. Do not drink coffee in early A.M. It will keep you awake until noon. Do not go from the slavery of the Communist regime to the slavery of consumerism.

Pope John Paul II

#55. I think one of the very frightening things about the regime of the National Socialists is that it made people happy.

A. N. Wilson

#56. I want it to serve as a reminder of the terrible human consequences of Mao's dictatorship and of how good and talented people living under his regime were forced to violate their consciences and sacrifice their ideals in order to survive.

Li Zhisui

#57. My parents, fleeing a repressive regime in the Dominican Republic, were embraced by this country and taught us to love it in return. After my father served proudly in the U.S. Army, they settled in Buffalo, N.Y., and were able to live the American Dream.

Thomas Perez

#58. The burden is on Saddam Hussein. And our policy, our national policy - not the UN policy but our national policy - is that the regime should be changed until such time as he demonstrates that it is not necessary to change the regime because the regime has changed itself.

Colin Powell

#59. Whoever we were - and it was not really important what religion we belonged to, whether we wished to wear the veil or not, whether we observed certain religious norms or not - we had become the figment of someone else's dreams.

Azar Nafisi

#60. punishment was withholding food. Starvation was the way the regime preferred to eliminate its opponents. It

Barbara Demick

#61. Is it not obvious that Britain, under the regime of Tony Blair, has ceased to respect the Charter of the United Nations?

Robert Mugabe

#62. The Obama administration rarely demonstrated the ability to shift gears and change policy in its first year. Even in the face of historic events such as the continuing demonstrations against Iran's regime, it stuck devotedly to prior plans.

Elliott Abrams

#63. The Assad regime is quite reliant on oil exports.

Elliott Abrams

#64. Also, when you escape a Communist regime, you treasure liberty and you understand that as government and state expand, liberty must contract.

Dennis Prager

#65. I've said before: If Osama bin Laden was a Christian, Iraq was the Christmas present he always wanted but never expected his parents to give. It validated for the Muslim world virtually all of bin Laden's rhetoric. He had always said the Americans will destroy any strong Muslim regime, and we did.

Michael Scheuer

#66. Those who back the Syrian regime from now on will find themselves in an even more isolated and indefensible minority.

William Hague

#67. ISIS is in many ways a creation of the Syrian regime.

Richard Engel

#68. We cannot blame other people for our troubles. We are not victims of the influx of foreign people into South Africa. We must remember that it was mainly due to the aggressive and hostile policies of the apartheid regime that the economic development of our neighbours was undermined.

Nelson Mandela

#69. 'Shabiha' is a difficult word to translate into English. It comes from the word Syrians used to describe the luxury Mercedes favored by the Assad family's operatives that the enforcers of the regime used to move money, smuggle weapons and intimidate opponents.

Richard Engel

#70. Unfortunately, the case for equal opportunities, long established in
liberal Western society, cuts no ice in the fundamentalist regime if
the five-year old. There is no God but Mummy, and Daddy is her
prophet.

Allison Pearson

#71. Democracy is a kingless regime infested by many kings who are sometimes more exclusive, tyrannical and destructive than one, even if he be a tyrant.

Benito Mussolini

#72. The press of Italy is free, freer than the press of any other country, so long as it supports the regime.

Benito Mussolini

#73. In the main the Academy helped to frame only laws of an economic or social nature, since owing to the development of the totalitarian regime it became more and more impossible to cooperate in other spheres.

Hans Frank

#74. For anyone to understand a regime like the GDR, the stories of ordinary people must be told. Not just the activists or the famous writers. You have to look at how normal people manage with such things in their pasts.

Anna Funder

#75. the regime's utter cultural and intellectual mediocrity, and especially its obsession with ensuring a rigid outward conformity to its neo-traditionalist values in public life.

Helen Graham

#76. The Iraqi regime ... possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons. It is seeking nuclear weapons. We know that the regime has produced thousands of tons of chemical agents, including mustard gas, sarin nerve gas, VX nerve gas.

George W. Bush

#77. People who foster dependence on illicit drugs such as heroin are regarded among the most unscrupulous pariahs of modern civilisation. In contrast, pushers of licit drugs tend to be viewed as altruistically motivated purveyors of social good.

John Braithwaite

#78. If the expansion of a global legal regime for communication technologies gains traction, the effects to the global economy as well as our individual liberties will be severe.

Marsha Blackburn

#79. A regime which is nominally liberal can be oppressive in reality. A regime which acknowledges its violence might have more genuine humanity.

Maurice Merleau Ponty

#80. I first met Kim Dae Jung when he was a Korean dissident whose life was threatened by the military regime ruling in Seoul. I was Ronald Reagan's Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights, and Kim was directed to me because the East Asia Bureau at the State Department had long shunned him.

Elliott Abrams

#81. Just as China achieved much more than India in the realm of public health and education under an austere Communist regime, so its economic growth under a capitalist-friendly government strikes a visitor from India as nothing less than spectacular.

Pankaj Mishra

#82. For more than 30 years the Islamic regime and its apologists have tried to dismiss women's struggle in Iran as part of a western ploy.

Azar Nafisi

#83. My father was always suppressing the softer side of my nature; it seemed to have disappeared in the course of those boxing lessons, that's what boxing did to me. My father took away the real me and replaced all what I could have been by imposing his brutal regime of terror upon me.

Stephen Richards

#84. [Hillary] Clinton is too much into regime change and a little bit too aggressive without knowing what the unintended consequences might be. Yes, we could get rid of Assad tomorrow, but that would create another political vacuum that would benefit ISIS.

Bernie Sanders

#85. We don't have a state, neither in Gaza nor in the West Bank. Gaza is under siege and the West Bank is occupied. What we have in the Gaza Strip is not a state, but rather a regime of an elected government. A Palestinian state will not be created at this time except in the territories of 1967.

Ismail Haniyeh

#86. It was ironic but somehow fitting that the 1905 Revolution should have been started by an organisation dreamed up by the tsarist regime itself. No-one believed more than Father Gapon in the bond between Tsar and people.

Orlando Figes

#87. You don't get the fox to be in charge of the chicken coop. You don't give the outgoing regime - which has been practicing dictatorship, is an authoritarian system, it's a bunch of military people - the task of changing Egypt into a second republic, a new Egypt with democracy, freedom, rights, etc.

Mohamed ElBaradei

#88. In such a regime, I say, you died a good death if your life had inspired someone to come forward and shoot your murderer in the chest-without asking to be paid.

Chinua Achebe

#89. A totalitarian regime thus has one political party, one educational system, one artistic creed, one centrally planned economy, one unified media, and one moral code. In a totalitarian state there are no independent schools, no private businesses, no grassroots organizations, and no critical thought.

Anne Applebaum

#90. When a nation has allowed itself to fall under a tyrannical regime, it cannot be absolved from the faults due to the guilt of that regime.

Winston Churchill

#91. It's a lot harder to stick to my regime when I'm travelling, so when I'm home, I make sure that when I wake up in the morning, I drink one litre of water with lemon to cleanse my body from the inside, and then I'll have a big jar of vegetable juice.

Valentina Zelyaeva

#92. We need a regime change in this country ... If we launch a pre-emptive strike on Iraq we lose all moral authority.

Jesse Jackson

#93. The way to make the giving a free vote safe for a totalitarian capitalist regime is simple - make all political parties the same!

Dave Mearns

#94. If we do not try harder to remember the history of the other half of the European continent, the history of the other twentieth-century totalitarian regime, in the end it is we in the West who will not understand our past, we who will not know how our world came to be the way it is. And

Anne Applebaum

#95. Warfare is now an interlocking system of actions - political, economic,
psychological, military - that aims at the overthrow of the established
authority in a country and its replacement by another regime.

Roger Trinquier

#96. Iran will for sure have pledged to the international community that it will not develop a nuclear weapon, and now will be subject to an additional protocol, a more vigorous inspection and monitoring regime that lasts in perpetuity.

Barack Obama

#97. My U.N. five-point plan focuses on preventing proliferation, strengthening the legal regime, and ensuring nuclear safety and security - an effort that was given good momentum by the Nuclear Security Summit held in Seoul earlier this year. The world is over-armed, and peace is underfunded.

Ban Ki-moon

#98. The regime is in trouble economically and can no longer offer anything to its citizens. That's why [Vladimir] Putin has to pursue an aggressive foreign policy, so he can serve his people the fairy tale of Russian pride and regaining its strength as a major power.

Garry Kasparov

#99. We invaded Iraq to change a totalitarian, despotic regime, and we have been successful there.

Judd Gregg

#100. The way I enjoyed spending time most was dancing. That's from the time I was a very small child, When I was 4 or 5 years old, I remember already having a regime. It was the way I always identified myself.

Twyla Tharp