Quotes About Tyranny

Judged by every standard which history has applied to Governments, the Soviet Government of Russia is one of the worst tyrannies that has ever existed in the world. It accords no political rights. It rules by terror. It punishes political opinions. It suppresses free speech. It tolerates no newspapers but its own. It persecutes Christianity with a zeal and a cunning never equalled since the times of the Roman Emperors.

Yet when the denial becomes so complete that we live under what amounts to a tyranny of not seeing and not speaking the existential truth, it becomes dangerous itself. This is what makes the closest and deepest experiences of catastrophe, loss, and failure so

The crimes of a caligula shrink to insignificance compared to the havoc wrought by Torquemada.

What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?

I was going to die, sooner or later, whether or not I had even spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silences will not protect you…. What are the words you do not yet have? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? We have been socialized to respect fear more than our own need for language.

When unlimited and unrestricted by individual rights a government is men's deadliest enemy.

I would recommend to anyone Professor Alan Bullock's definitive Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, Daniel Goldhagen's brilliant Hitler's Willing Executioners as well as the above mentioned Those Were the Days.

Music, in the precision of its form and the mathematical tyranny of its laws, escapes into an eternity of abstraction and an absurd sublime that is everywhere and nowhere at once.

A hurt body and mind aren't just like a dictatorship; they are a dictatorship. There is no tyrant as merciless as pain, no despot so cruel as confusion.

He wanted what evil men always want: to have power and use that power to make mischief.

The place where the prince of darkness reigns is a place of humiliation

Our new battle is not with overt Marxist tyranny, but with something more subtle—an irreligious government that wants to agglomerate ever more power over our lives in the name of making things fairer and keeping people happier, of smoothing over our differences and soothing our fragile egos.

Our culture is just a series of checks and balances. The whole idea that we're in a battle between tyranny and freedom - it's a series of pendulum swings.

The village may have replaced "the state," and it in turn may have replaced the fist with the hug, but an unwanted embrace from which you cannot escape is just a nicer form of tyranny.

Because there is something about tyranny, monarchy, and authoritarianism that "works," by which I mean there is something in our wiring that finds such systems natural.

What kind of person actually sits down and decides that no one should be allowed to end a sentence with a preposition? Not even decide what ideas you should or shouldn't talk about, but to actually make rules about what order to put your words in... It's such an amazing kind of petty tyranny.

See how (for instance) the cultural can be freed from the tyranny of the natural; gender from biology; how social change has occurred, and how it can change again; how to reveal and defend (without fetishizing) cultural difference; how to make visible the 'political unconscious' of our culture.

sovereign power [or soft despot] extends its arms over the entire society; it covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated, minute, and uniform rules . . . it does not tyrannize, it hinders, it represses, it enervates, it extinguishes, it stupefies, and finally it reduces each nation to being nothing more than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd. ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE, Democracy in America1

The sovereign power [or soft despot] extends its arms over the entire society; it covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated, minute, and uniform rules . . . it does not tyrannize, it hinders, it represses, it enervates, it extinguishes, it stupefies, and finally it reduces each nation to being nothing more than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd. ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE, Democracy in America1

When he turns tyrant, and makes his subjects his prey to devour and destroy, instead of his charge to defend and cherish, we are bound to throw off our allegiance to him (the ruler), and to resist.

Freedom is not won by merely overthrowing a tyrannical ruler or an oppressive regime. That is usually only the prelude to a new tyranny, a new oppression.

The trouble was that they also argued that the worst thing you can have is certainty. Conviction, they said, leads to tyranny. On this they were wrong, indeed self-contradictory. Hayek was certain that freedom was preferable to slavery

Così Hailè Selassiè non era un santo". Aaron Melchiades sollevò le sopracciglia, sospirò e disse: "Diciamo che se lo era non ce ne eravamo accorti". Poi aggiunse: "Sarà così anche per Mussolini. Rimpiangere i tiranni è molto più semplice che sopportarli".

Los tiranos creen que el poder se conserva a punta de bayoneta. En México no es así: basta con repartir a la masa un puñado de cohetes y unos barriles de pulque.