Quote by Michael Booth

“It is seven months since a thirty-two-year-old Oslo man, the racist extremist Anders Behring Breivik, single-handedly doubled Norway's average annual homicide rate in one afternoon, killing a total of seventy-seven people ... From my seat in the bus nothing appears to have changed. What did I expect? That the Norwegians would have put up razor wire and enforced constant police patrols? Hardly likely in a land where the then prime minister, at the memorial service to the dead of Utoya and the Oslo bomb, gave one of the most courageous speeches in defense of public freedom I have ever heard. Jens Stoltenberg had called for 'more openness, more democracy,' at a time when most politicians elsewhere in the world would have used an attack of that nature to pledge revenge, exploit the anxieties of the electorate, garner greater authority and power, and then compromise civil liberties. His speech was a reminder that the political leaders of the north have often served as the moral compass of the world.”

Quote by Michael Booth