Quotes About Despotism

Let's fight, ye gods and little fishes! I've had enough of despotism.

Mais soyons justes envers l'aristocratie. Elle a fait équilibre à la royauté; elle a été contrepoids. Elle a fait obstacle au despotisme; elle a été barrière. Remercions-la, et enterrons-la.

Other offences, even the greatest, are the violation of one law: despotism is the violation of all.

173 despots would surely be as oppressive as one," wrote Jefferson in 1785 in his Notes on the State of Virginia. "An elective despotism was not the government we fought for."31

Equality, rightly understood as our founding fathers understood it, leads to liberty and to the emancipation of creative differences; wrongly understood, as it has been so tragically in our time, it leads first to conformity and then to despotism.

The possession of unlimited power will make a despot of almost any man. There is a possible Nero in the gentlest human creature that walks.

It is odd to consider the connection between despotism and barbarity, and how the making one person more than man makes the rest less.

When the white man governs himself, that is self-government; but when he governs himself and also governs another man, that is more than self-government-that is despotism.

People associated their emperor with a scale of horror fully comparable with Auschwitz – and perhaps worse. They.,were prepared to believe that living men and women nailed to posts,'•soaked in oil and set on fire were used to light a party, because the public enjoyment of torture was part of the fabric of their state. Death screams were part of the fun.

If Custine were among us now, he would recognise the evil of political correctness at once, because of the violence that it does to people's souls by forcing them to say or imply what they do not believe but must not question. Custine would demonstrate to us that, without an external despot to explain our pusillanimity, we have willingly adopted the mental habits of people who live under a totalitarian dictatorship. Custine

The possession of unlimited power will make a despot of almost any man. There is a possible Nero in the gentlest human creature that walks.

France was a long despotism tempered by epigrams.

France was long a despotism tempered by epigrams.

The Puritans nobly fled from a land of despotism to a land of freedim, where they could not only enjoy their own religion, but could prevent everybody else from enjoyin his.

The philosophers say that the passions are too lively, too fiery; in truth they are weak and languid. All around one sees the mass of men endure the persecution of a few masters and the despotism of prejudices without offering the slightest resistance... their passions are too weak to permit them to derive audacity from despair.

Historically, the common form of revolution has been a not-too-efficient despotism which is overthrown by another non-too-efficient despotism with little or no effect on the public good. Indeed, except for the change in the names of the ruling circles, it would be hard to distinguish one from the other.

Despotism may be the only organizational alternative to the political structure that we observe.

The South was rebelling "not in the interest of general humanity, but of a domestic despotism. … Their motto is not liberty, but slavery.

And even should the cloud of barbarism and despotism again obscure the science and liberties of Europe, this country remains to preserve and restore light and liberty to them. In short, the flames kindled on the fourth of July, 1776, have spread over too much of the globe to be extinguished by the feeble engines of despotism; on the contrary, they will consume these engines and all who work them.

The strength and power of despotism consists wholly in the fear of resistance.

It is not because a part of the government is elective, that makes it less a despotism, if the persons so elected possess afterwards, as a parliament, unlimited powers. Election, in this case, becomes separated from representation, and the candidates are candidates for despotism.

In despotic governments wars are the effect of pride; but in those governments in which they become the means of taxation, they acquire thereby a more permanent promptitude.

she felt in her mind the consciousness that she was entitled to hold a higher rank from her merit, than the arbitrary despotism of religious prejudice permitted her to aspire to.

Censorship places us all in subjection, just as under despotism we are all equal … that kind of freedom of the press acts to introduce oligarchy into questions of the spirit. … That [kind of] freedom of the press pushes presumptuousness to the point of forestalling world history, substituting itself for the voice of the people. …