Quotes About Despotism

The struggle for freedom is ultimately not resistance to autocrats or oligarchs but resistance to the despotism of public opinion.

The nation which will not adopt an equilibrium of power must adopt a despotism. There is no other alternative.

Despotism has so often been established in the name of liberty that experience should warn us to judge parties by their practices rather than their preachings.

The faith in reason insists that the poverty of democracy offers a greater hope for mankind than the prosperity that attaches itself to aristocracy or despotism.

Modern Western empires are different from empires of old as well as the Soviet empire of yesterday in one important respect: they combine a democratic political system at home with despotism abroad. Even in the German case, as Sheldon Wolin reminds us, Nazi terror was not applied to the population generally. So long as democracy is a living reality at home, democratic empires are potentially self-correcting.

Even despotism does not produce its worst effects, so long as individuality exists under it; and whatever crushes individuality is despotism, by whatever name it may be called, and whether it professes to be enforcing the will of God or the injunctions of men.

Beauty is the greatest of human powers. Any power without counterbalance or control becomes autocratic and leads to abuse and to folly. Despotism in a government is insanity; in woman, fantasy.

To consider judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions is a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy.

To begin with unlimited freedom is to end with unlimited despotism.

Tyranny and despotism can be exercised by many, more rigorously, more vigorously, and more severely, than by one.

Despotism can do without faith but freedom cannot.

Despotism sits nowhere so secure as under the effigy and ensigns of freedom.

Their poverty secured their freedom, since our desires and our possessions are the strongest fetters of despotism.

The writer harked back to Lord Byron's maiden speech in the House three years before: "I have been in some of the most oppressed provinces in Turkey, but never, under the most despotic of infidel Governments, did I behold such squalid wretchedness as I have seen since my return in the very heart of a Christian country." Mrs.

In a passage that foreshadows criticisms of equality from his time to the present, he also mentions the "despotism" of the law required to enforce equality and maintain it.[37]

Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism.

The revolutionary government is the despotism of liberty against tyranny.

The Americans are enemies of despotism," observed a Haitian journalist, "and to prevent its return, they invaded the country."42

Freedom of conscience entails more dangers than authority and despotism.

L'endoctrinement de la jeunesse dans les écoles était l'un des principaux piliers de ces États esclavagistes. En vérité, la principale différence entre les horreurs du XXème siècle et les despotismes plus anciens est que ces tyrannies modernes ont dû reposer sur un soutien des masses plus direct, et que par conséquent l'alphabétisation obligatoire et l'endoctrinement ont joué un rôle crucial.

The founders worried constantly about how their envisioned republic might get hijacked, especially by ambitious officials who would transform it into an elective despotism. This is what they meant.

The bourgeoisie, in the feudal framework, settles in small urban centers where it becomes structured and civilized. With the break-up of this framework, the bourgeoisie spreads across all of society, invents the nationalist state, rationalist technology, anonymous urban agglomerations, industrial society, the mass man, and finally the process in which society wavers between the despotism of the mob and the despotism of the expert.

Neither a declaration of human rights, nor the proclamation of a constitution, nor an appeal to natural law, protects against the arbitrary power of the state. The only barrier to despotism is customary law.

La condición suficiente y necesaria del despotismo es la desaparición de toda especie de autoridad social no conferida por el Estado.