Jazz is about freedom within discipline. Usually a dictatorship like in Russia and Germany will prevent jazz from being played because it just seemed to represent freedom democracy and the United States.

It is true you cannot eat freedom and you cannot power machinery with democracy. But then neither can political prisoners turn on the light in the cells of a dictatorship.

When the United States was founded the very idea of a nation premised on democratic principles of freedom and tolerance was viewed by the vast majority of the world as an experiment doomed to fail. Dictatorships monarchies and theocracies had for many centuries ruled the world.

I was interested by the idea that artists working in a totalitarian dictatorship or tsarist autocracy are secretly and slightly shamefully envied by artists who work in freedom. They have the gratification of intense interest: the authorities want to put them in jail while there are younger readers for whom what they write is pure oxygen.

Anywhere anytime ordinary people are given the chance to choose the choice is the same: freedom not tyranny democracy not dictatorship the rule of law not the rule of the secret police.

True individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.

Dictators and oppressors should continue to fear me because I will be here for a long time.

The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness.

It has been claimed at times that our modern age of technology facilitates dictatorship.