Sparks: Human rights lawyer Francesca Albanese on life under US sanctions - podcast

Sanctions are simply another master's ledger, marking those who speak truth as property to be seized.

That government is best which governs least, and worst which governs by punitive ledger.

Observe the ledger of state: one column lists principles, the other lists silenced voices, and no one remarks on the contradiction.

Control your own judgment, for the sanctions of men cannot touch it.

Power never concedes without demand, and its newest demand is silence, purchased with the currency of access.

Nothing so needs reforming as other people's inconvenient truths, a task for which sanctions provide such a tidy, respectable tool.

Ain't a sanction just a new chain for a mind they cannot own?

That moral ledger which tallies sanctions instead of sins illustrates political economy in its most brutal domestic form.

A nation's character is measured not by the principles it proclaims but by the advocates it chooses to punish.

Remember the voices they would silence, for their exclusion defines the limits of our proclaimed liberty.

To punish a person for testimony is to confess your own argument cannot survive the light.

Before removing a critic with sanctions, one ought to explain why the criticism was built.

How ingenious, this system for defending tolerance by making examples of the tolerably inconvenient.

The same concentrated interest that petitions for free trade petitions more loudly for the silencing of its opponents.

Diagnosis: a state prescribing penalties for truth-tellers exhibits the same symptomatic pride as a physician denying contagion.

Count the names on the sanction list, note the stated reasons, and you will find the pattern of a policy.

The committee for the preservation of open debate has unanimously voted to suspend the membership of anyone who debates too openly.

To understand the mechanism of a sanction, you must feel its lock click shut upon your own work.