A New Regime Quotes & Sayings

The whole problem is that the regime is a reflection of society. Crooked and grotesque, but still a reflection. And as long as most of the citizens of a country - if they happened to gain power - would steal and regard themselves as better than other people, no remoralization of the ruling circles will change anything. Those politicians who acquire a conscience will leave. And new ones without consciences will take their places. It's people who have to change, society - — Sergei Lukyanenko

Ironically, even as Khomeini empowered some women, he also found ways of oppressing their entire gender. The regime replaced the shah's secular law with an Islamic law, which allowed men to marry up to four wives, to divorce them whenever the husbands wished, and to retain custody of children. The law put the value of a woman's life at half of that of a man's life, and the value of her testimony at half that of a man's testimony.
Thus women in Iran became watchdogs and scapegoats, both the foot soldiers of the new regime and its victims. Newly empowered, they were also newly oppressed. Theirs was a paradoxical plight - and at the time, no one could have foreseen how it would one day make women a force of enormous change in Iran. — Nazila Fathi

The coup that overthrew President Chavez of Venezuela in April 2002 was greeted with euphoria in Washington. The new president - a businessman - was instantly recognized and the hope expressed that stability and order would return to the country, thus creating the basis for solid future development. The New York Times editorialized in identical language.
... The coup was reversed three days later and Chavez then came back to power. The State Department soberly denied any prior knowledge about anything, saying it was all an internal matter. It was to be hoped that a peaceful, democratic, and constitutional solution to the difficulties would be arrived at, they said. The New York Times editorial followed suit, merely adding that perhaps it was not a good idea to embrace the overthrow of a democratically elected regime, however obnoxious, too readily if one of America's fundamental values was support for democracy. — David Harvey

And yet, over the years I've met so many people like Jared who seem to be more at home, happier, living in a country on of their birth ... Not political refugees, escaping a repressing regime, nor economic refugees, crossing a border in search of a better-paying job. The are hedonic refugees, moving to a new land, a new culture, because they are happier there. Usually hedonic refugees have an ephiphany, a moment of great clarity when they realize, beyond a doubt, that they were born in the wrong country. — Eric Weiner

To start a new country, with new values and newly minted socialist citizens, it is necessary to begin at the beginning: with children. Schoolteachers in the eastern regions were immediately dismissed because their job had been to educate children in the values of the Nazi regime. Socialist teachers had to be created. — Anna Funder

Before this regime started, I had a reasonably long password - about eleven characters long, if I recall correctly. But the constant pressure to make a new password has steadily degraded my ingenuity. In 2012 I gave up and just made each password into the month that the e-mail reminder arrived. So when the March e-mail password reset reminder arrived, I changed my password to March2012! (with the requisite exclamation point to satisfy the symbol police). In June, I changed it to 2012June?, and on like that. I had dropped to nine easily guessable characters. — Julia Angwin

The promotion of human rights cannot be about exhortation alone. At times, it must be coupled with painstaking diplomacy. I know that engagement with repressive regimes lacks the satisfying purity of indignation. But I also know that sanctions without outreach
condemnation without discussion
can carry forward only a crippling status quo. No repressive regime can move down a new path unless it has the choice of an open door. — Barack Obama

And he would have also to endure his book like a form of fatigue, to accept it like a discipline, build it up like a church, follow it like a medical regime, vanquish it like an obstacle, win it like a friendship, cosset it like a little child, create it like a new world without neglecting those mysteries whose explanation is to be found probably only in worlds other than our own and the presentiment of which is the thing that moves us most deeply in life and in art. — Marcel Proust

You have to be strong; you have to trust yourself that you can bring down the dictatorship regime and build a new country. You have to be part of building your country. We know that anything that you dream can happen. You have to know that you have the ability to achieve your dream. — Tawakkol Karman

Less well known but perhaps even more convincing is that Khrushchev's own and most ambitious attempt at reversing the process of detotalitarization turned into a complete failure. In 1957, he introduced a new "law against social parasites," which would have enabled the regime to reintroduce mass deportations, re-establish slave labor on a large scale, and - most importantly for total domination - to let loose another flood of mass denunciations; for "parasites" were supposed to be selected by the people themselves in mass meetings. The — Hannah Arendt

He was desperately lonely. He had a hard time connecting with new people. If South Koreans were sympathetic toward him, he found them condescending. Even though he hated the North Korean regime, he found he'd get defensive when South Koreans criticized it. This was a common predicament for defectors. — Barbara Demick

The median family of four ... paid $4,722 in federal taxes last year. That's enough to pay for a new curtain for the secretary of commerce's office, to bribe a farmer not to plant 38 acres with corn ... seven weeks of salary for a Customs man assigned to save us from the terror of high-quality, low priced foreign TV sets, or the subsidy on 6,000 bushels of wheat to prop up the Soviet regime. Surely civilization would collapse without such essential services. — Alan Bock

I'd just like to say "thank you" to President Bush and to the men and women of the US military, who by the New York Times' own admission took out a terror-sponsoring regime in Iraq that could have constructed a nuclear weapon within months, as soon as sanctions were lifted enough for them to obtain sufficient fissile material. — Charles Foster Johnson

I'm in the dark as to how close to an edge or transition to a new ocean and climate regime we might me. But I know which way we are walking. We are walking toward the cliff. — Terry Joyce

Enlightened sexism is a response, deliberate or not, to the perceived threat of a new gender regime. It insists that women have made plenty of progress because of feminism - indeed, full equality has allegedly been achieved - so now it's okay, even amusing, to resurrect sexist stereotypes of girls and women. — Susan J. Douglas

It is not our place to decide who should lead the Iraqi people. If Saddam [Hussein] leaves or has to be forced out of power and a new regime brought in, a new leadership brought in, I am confident it will be some combination of people inside the country and outside the country. — Colin Powell

To introduce a whole new tax regime, that would be modern tax reform. But that's too big a task. — Chuck Schumer

The rationale for the FDA's rigid standards is to avoid the sale of a drug like thalidomide. But the unintended consequence is almost certainly to allow many more people to die prematurely than would have died from side-effects under a less restrictive regime. We count and recount the costs of such side-effects. We do not count the costs of not allowing new drugs to be made available. — Niall Ferguson

Classically, at the beginning of a regime change, it is usually a good idea and trustworthy gesture for the new leader to renounce the evildoings of the old administration and establish as much distance from the outgoing disgrace as possible. When — Cintra Wilson

We are about to enter a new era in which, each year, less net energy will be available to humankind, regardless of our efforts or choices. The only significant choice we will have will be how we adjust to this new regime. That choice - not whether, but how to reduce energy usage and make a transition to renewable alternatives - will have profound ethical and political ramifications. — Richard Heinberg

But that spring, the complex and tenuous political arrangements that had made their positions possible were undone by the racism of a new regime. "I have plans that are all ruined, utterly ruined," despaired Census clerk William Jennifer.1 The opportunities and stability he and so many others had come to expect from government employment would all but vanish. This is a book about how that world of possibility, work, politics, and mobility was snuffed out. It is a story of how "good government" became the special preserve of white men. — Eric S. Yellin

The rite, the becoming-animal of the scapegoat clearly illustrates this: a first expiatory animal is sacrificed, but a second is driven away, sent out into the desert wilderness. In the signifying regime, the scapegoat represents a new form of increasing entropy in the system of signs: it is charged with everything that was "bad" in a given period, that is, everything that resisted signifying signs, everything that eluded the referral from sign to sign through the different circles; it also assumes everything that was unable to recharge the signifier as its center and carries off everything that spills beyond the outermost circle. — Gilles Deleuze

The overthrowing of slavery, then, is through the transformation of men and women by the gospel rather than through merely changing an economic system. We've all seen what can happen when you merely overthrow an economic system and impose a new order. The whole communist dream was the have a 'revolutionary man' followed by the 'new man.' Trouble is, they never found the 'new man.' They got rid of the oppressors of the peasants, but that didn't mean the peasants were suddenly free--they were just under a new regime of darkness. In the final analysis, if you want lasting change, you've got to transform the hearts of human beings. And that was Jesus' mission. — Lee Strobel

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

Oh, indeed there is a tie between Iraq and what happened on 9/11. It's not that Saddam Hussein was somehow himself and his regime involved in 9/11, but, if you think about what caused 9/11, it is the rise of ideologies of hatred that lead people to drive airplanes into buildings in New York. — Condoleezza Rice

It was a strange season coaching under that new [Alderson] regime. I felt like I was watching the deterioration of the Mets organization. They seemed to have no identity. My concern was that the character of the players they were looking for superseded the talent they brought to the table. Character on a team is important, but you've got to have the horses to win. — Mookie Wilson

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

I've been writing a lot about a new form of Russian imperialism. Actually, Russian Orthodox imperialism. It's very little remarked that the cement, the political, ideological cement of the Russian regime now, communism having collapsed and imploded, is increasingly a confessional one. — Christopher Hitchens

Most of those who manage investment operations or who have sizable amounts of money to invest are, indeed, Republican in their politics. Naturally, perhaps inevitably, they believe in the politicians they support, the doctrines these profess, and the economic advantage flowing therefrom. It is especially easy for those seemingly so blessed to be persuaded of the new and approximately infinite opportunities for enrichment inherent in a Republican age under a Republican regime. So in 1929; so again before the crash in 1987. All so vulnerable and all so affected, whatever their politics, should be warned. T — John Kenneth Galbraith

At that same time, the Communist regime let the inflation run its course and then, devalued the currency. They issued a new kind of lei. Everybody could exchange 80,000 lei for 20 new lei. The day before the exchange, I had 2 million lei. For that amount, I bought two pairs of hand crocheted summer gloves; there was nothing else available. I would have preferred to purchase a kilo meat, but that was out of the question, unrealistic thinking. — Pearl Fichman

Freedom is not won by merely overthrowing a tyrannical ruler or an oppressive regime. That is usually only the prelude to a new tyranny, a new oppression. — Jonathan Sacks

We demand justice," Jeff says. "we don't have it, the world is a mess because of assholes who think they can steal everything and get away with it. So we have to overwhelm them and get back to justice."
"And conditions are ripe, is that what you're saying?"
"Very ripe. People are pissed off. They're scared for their kids. That's the moment things can tip. If it works like Chenoweth's law says it does, then you only need about fifteen percent of a population to engage in civil disobedience, and the rest see it and support it, and the oligarchy falls. You get a new legal regime. It doesn't have to get all bloody and lead to a thugocracy of violent revolutionaries. If can work. And conditions are ripe. — Kim Stanley Robinson

Marshal Petain's Vichy regime looked like that new start. A couple of years later, it wasn't so evident that he was going to be able to protect them from German extortions, and it didn't look so much as though they had won the war, either. And so by '43, a lot of people are shifting sides. — Robert O. Paxton

The anarch is oriented to facts, not ideas. He fights alone, as a free man, and would never dream of sacrificing himself to having one inadequacy supplant another and a new regime triumph over the old one. In this sense, he is closer to the philistine; the baker whose chief concern is to bake good bread; the peasant, who works his plow while armies march across his fields. — Ernst Junger

Because enough people in both cases voluntarily extended their services to the new leaders, Nazis and communists alike realized that they could move quickly toward a full regime change. The first heedless acts of conformity could not then be reversed. In — Timothy Snyder

When President Mbeki said, if you get AIDS, you can have a shower and it goes away. It's like, oh, come on. Or it's caused by poverty. We faced those kind of issues. But now, with the new regime, they have really woken up, paid attention. And when South Africa speaks, then the whole of Africa will listen. And I have got great hopes for that. — Elton John

In the 20 long, hungry years between my late teens and late 30s I bought in to virtually every new diet and/or exercise regime that hoved into view, particularly at this most vulnerable time for those of us prone to poor body image - a new year. — Arabella Weir

The truth is France has been the chief Western advocate of normalizing relations with Iraq - one of its largest trading partners - for years, partly because France holds billions in IOUs from Iraq that wouldn't be redeemable by a new regime. — Jonah Goldberg

At a time when the threat of nuclear arms is again increasing, the Norwegian Nobel Committee wishes to underline that this threat must be met through the broadest possible international cooperation. This principle finds its clearest expression today in the work of the IAEA and its director general. In the nuclear non-proliferation regime, it is the IAEA which ensures that nuclear energy is not misused for military purposes, and the director general has stood out as an unafraid advocate of new measures to strengthen that regime. — Mohamed ElBaradei