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The trouble with free elections is, you never know who is going to win.
--
This was quoted as an anonymous saying heard in Moscow around the time of the first Russian elections, in Voltaire, Goldberg & Others : A Compendium of the Witty, the Profound and the Absurd (2000), p. 201; it was later attributed to Brezhnev in Brewer's Famous Quotations: 5000 Quotations and the Stories Behind Them (2006) by Nigel Rees, p.441, but without citations, and it is clearly derived from a statement widely attributed to Vyacheslav Molotov as early as the 1954 Berlin Conference, according to an eyewitness writing in International Affairs Vol. 36 (1960), p. 4 : "The trouble with free elections is that you never know how they are going to to turn out."

 

Leonid Brezhnev

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The trouble with free elections is that you never know how they are going to to turn out.

 

Vyacheslav Molotov

 

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Serzh Sargsyan

 

There are elections and elections, there are many Arab presidents who are elected with 99.9, 94.7, 87.4 percent of the vote in elections but nobody believes these elections. They're not real elections and the election that's going to be held in Iraq in January, if it is held at all - and there is a big question mark over that – will not be a real election. How can you have a real election with hundreds of thousands of Crusader soldiers occupying the country, drawing up the electoral law, deciding who is allowed to take part in the elections, and utterly dominating the political life of the country?

 

George Galloway

 

At the present moment in world history nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life. The choice is too often not a free one.
One way of life is based upon the will of the majority, and is distinguished by free institutions, representative government, free elections, guarantees of individual liberty, freedom of speech and religion, and freedom from political oppression.
The second way of life is based upon the will of a minority forcibly imposed upon the majority. It relies upon terror and oppression, a controlled press and radio; fixed elections, and the suppression of personal freedoms.
I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.
I believe that we must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way.

 

Harry S. Truman

 

I know a whole generation has been raised on the notion of multiculturalism; that all civilizations are just different. No! Not always. Sometimes things are better! Rule of law is better than autocracy and theocracy; equality of the sexes, better; protection of minorities, better; free speech, better; free elections, better; free appliances with large purchases, better! Don't get so tolerant that you tolerate intolerance.

 

Bill Maher