Life & Wisdom Quote by Natan Sharansky

Sharansky’s line reads like a tidy inventory, but it’s really a trap laid for the reader’s resignation. By labeling these doubts “the three main sources of scepticism,” he frames hesitation about promoting freedom not as prudence but as a predictable ideology: a set of excuses that recur whenever autocrats want to be left alone and democracies want permission to look away.

The first claim - “not every people desires freedom” - is the oldest paternalism in foreign policy. It flatters tyrants with cultural exceptionalism and flatters outsiders with the sense that oppression is somebody else’s tradition. Sharansky, a former Soviet dissident, knows that argument intimately: the Kremlin’s favorite story was that stability, not liberty, was the authentic public demand. His subtext is blunt: when you can’t measure desire under coercion, “they don’t want it” is just what power says about the powerless.

The second doubt - that democracy would be “dangerous” in certain regions - names the security panic that turns every demand for rights into a prelude to chaos. It’s the logic of “better our strongman than their uncertainty,” dressed up as realism. Sharansky pushes back by implying that “danger” is often the cost of transition, not proof that freedom is misfit for a place.

The third scepticism targets democratic fatalism: the idea that nothing can be done beyond borders. Here he’s making a political demand, not a philosophical one. If democracies claim global influence when it suits markets and military strategy, they can’t plead impotence when the subject is human dignity. The sentence works because it turns cynicism into a catalog - and catalogs invite rebuttal, point by point.