For really good encryption us at least a 64 character password as well. Any favorite sentence or quotation will do.
Um, no. Any sentence which is familiar or easily guessed, like "Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers" will be readily found, just like "p4ssw0rd" and the like. Due to desires for convenience, we're all subject to introducing weaknesses like this, to some degree.
The best way to set a long and challenging passphrase is to concatenate, say, 7 or more words from the English language, selected at random. The mathematics of that become quite prohibitive, as far as anyone ever "guessing" the entire sequence. You're talking about (number of words in the English language, say >150K) to the 7th power or more, in a case like that. A very large number of combinations.
There are articles about methods like this to be found on the internet. The key is to have a piece of software do the generation randomly, and then you memorize the n-word sequence, thus removing any of your own biases from weakening the encryption. This, combined with things like PGP and its ilk should give you very strong encryption (when properly implemented).
And it's nothing the government can mandate backdoors into. The acquired knowledge of the human race in mathematics has created a situation wherein if someone wants to encrypt some information, the government isn't going to be able to do much about it. The notion that the State can simply "outlaw" the math is, of course, absolutely ludicrous...