So, I think that for the authorities to say now that calling for sanctions will prevent dialogue is a ploy to stop us from supporting sanctions. It has to be the other way around: dialogue first, then we stop our call for sanctions, because sanctions make people understand that you cannot exercise repression and at the same time expect international support.

The true measure of the justice of a system is the amount of protection it guarantees to the weakest.

Calamities that are not the result of purely natural phenomena usually have their origins, distant and obscure though they may be, in common human failings.

One prisoner of conscience is one too many.

Human rights must be protected by the rule of law, and there can never be occasions where human rights can be neglected or ignored or the rule of law set aside.

Freedom and democracy are dreams you never give up.

Some of the most relaxing weekends I have ever enjoyed were those I spent quietly with a sense of all work to date completed, and an absorbing mystery.