On account of being a democracy and run by the people, we are the only nation in the world that has to keep a government four years, no matter what it does.

Democracy, loudly upheld as a cure for much of the ailing world, has proved no guarantor of political wisdom, even if it remains the least bad form of government.

Despite all the gains for democracy in the world, in many countries anyone who wants to publish truths unwelcome to the government risks suppression and criminal punishment.

Once you put in backdoors, once you allow a government to intercept anything they want, you have to give it to other governments around the world. Once you do that, there is no privacy; there is no security. There is no protection for democracy.

People are constantly applying double standards. Take the United States, for example. Washington wants the whole world to admire the country for its democracy. Then the government sends out its army, in the name of this democracy, and leaves behind the kind of chaos we see in Iraq.

The people I spoke to who were worried they would be killed for talking to me are now all ministers in the government. This is a major, major breakthrough. You have democracy actually working, the return of the rule of law, in an area of the world which was really tipping into the night.

'Chinese Democracy' wasn't trying to tell China to have a democracy or anything like that. I don't have an opinion on what kind of government they should have. My thing is, I went to stay there for about three months, and everywhere I went, the people are so shielded from what's going on in the world.

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