Life & Wisdom Quote by Natan Sharansky

"Of course" does a lot of covert labor here. Sharansky isn’t conceding a point so much as preempting a familiar deflection: the cynical move that treats any flaw in a democracy as proof that democracy is a sham. By admitting "serious injustices" up front, he disarms the whataboutism he spent his life confronting as a Soviet dissident and later as an Israeli politician. The line is built as a rhetorical inoculation: yes, free societies can fail people badly; no, that failure is not the same kind of failure as a system designed to silence you.

The subtext is a hierarchy of wrongs. In Sharansky’s moral framework, injustice inside a free society is tragic but contestable: it can be named, litigated, protested, voted against. In an unfree society, the injustice is structural and self-protecting; even describing it becomes a punishable act. That’s why the sentence hinges on "within". The container matters. He’s separating abuses that occur despite freedom from abuses that persist because freedom is absent.

Context sharpens the stakes. Sharansky’s biography is a case study in how authoritarian regimes use the language of equality and anti-imperialism to excuse coercion, while democracies are asked to meet impossible standards of purity. The quote’s intent is not to flatter the West but to insist on a practical distinction: imperfect openness still creates mechanisms for repair, and that repairability is the real measure of a society’s freedom.