Quotes About One-man rule

Others have seen the assassination as a useful reminder of the futility of such attempts at direct action. For what did it achieve? If the assassins had really wanted to quash the rise of one-man rule in Rome, if they wanted to kill the tyranny as well as the tyrant, they were strikingly unsuccessful.

In fact, it was Lenin and Trotsky who set up the totalitarian apparatus Stalin would use to impose his one-man rule—and they knew exactly what it would be used to do.

The dangers of one-man rule—of a president who would seek to "perpetuate himself in office"—could be realized, he wrote, only in "the last stage of corrupted morals and political depravity." And at that grim point, term limits would be of no consequence.

There are a lot of benefits representative of government and it is far better than any type of dictatorial system and it is far better than a one-man rule situation.

The Dalai Lama, for example, is entirely and easily recognizable to a secularist. In exactly the same way as a medieval princeling, he makes the claim not just that Tibet should be independent of Chinese hegemony—a "perfectly good" demand, if I may render it into everyday English—but that he himself is a hereditary king appointed by heaven itself. How convenient! Dissenting sects within his faith are persecuted; his one-man rule in an Indian enclave is absolute;

Whichever side won, as Cicero again observed, the result was set to be much the same: slavery for Rome. What came to be seen as a war between liberty and one-man rule was really a war to choose between rival emperors.

Once the outcome is known, it is easy to present the period as a series of irrevocable and brutal steps in the direction of crisis or as a slow countdown to both the end of the free state and the return of one-man rule. But the last century of the Republic was more than a mere bloodbath. As the flowering of poetry, theory and art suggests, it was also a period when Romans grappled with the issues that were undermining their political process and came up with some of their greatest inventions