"How could we bear, nursed as we have been in a free atmosphere, to be gagged and muzzled; to have spies, eavesdroppers and delators at every corner; to have even private conversations caught up and used against us by the Secret Police and all their agents and creatures; to be arrested and interned without trial; or to be tried by political or Party courts for crimes hitherto unknown to civil law. How could we bear to be treated like schoolboys when we are grown-up men; to be turned out on parade by tens of thousands to march and cheer for this slogan or for that; to see philosophers, teachers and authors bullied and toiled to death in concentration camps; to be forced every hour to conceal the natural workings of the human intellect and the pulsations of the human heart? Why, I say that rather than submit to such oppression, there is no length we would not go to."
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Nobel laureates in LiteraturePeople from OxfordPrime Ministers of the United KingdomPoliticians from EnglandHistorians from England
Original Language: English
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Sources
Speech at Théâtre des Ambassadeurs, Paris (24 September 1936), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Prophet of Truth: Winston S. Churchill, 1922–1939 (1976), p. 788
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Winston_Churchill
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Winston Churchill
1874 – 1965
britischer Politiker
689 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Winston Churchill →
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