Quotes About Tyranny

The prolonged use of violence may lead in the end to the loss of freedom, since it is liable to bring about not a dispassionate rule of reason, but the rule of the strong man. A violent revolution which tries to attempt more than the destruction of tyranny is at least as likely to bring about another tyranny as it is likely to achieve its real aims.

The theory I have in mind is one which does not proceed, as it were, from a doctrine of the intrinsic goodness or righteousness of a majority rule, but rather from the baseness of tyranny; or more precisely, it rests upon the decision, or upon the adoption of the proposal, to avoid and to resist tyranny.

Every enlightened path can turn on itself and become a new tyranny

Knowledge by itself is not power, but it holds the potential for power if we use it a s a guide for action. Truth will always be defeated by tyranny unless the people are willing to step forward and put their lives into the battle. The future belongs, not to ideas, but to people who act on those ideas.

The word bureaucratie was coined in the early eighteenth century by Jean-Claude Marie Vincent, a French government minister. Translated as "the rule of desks," the label was not intended as a compliment. Vincent viewed France's vast administrative apparatus as a threat to the spirit of enterprise. (Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.) A century later, in 1837, the British philosopher John Stuart Mill described bureaucracy as a vast tyrannical network.

Marx stepped into history as the coauthor of the Communist Manifesto of 1848. Capitalism, he said, stood for the rule of human products over human communities. It gained power, grew out of control, constrained human expectations, and blighted the lives of the overwhelming majority, the working-class proletariat. Communism was precisely the abolition of capitalist tyranny and liberation from it.

Yet history has taught us again and again that a small and rabid group of people can tyrannize a splintered larger group.

After all, our experience tends to confirm that on one end of the political spectrum we have autocrats and tyrants—horrible, selfish thugs who occasionally stray into psychopathology. On the other end, we have democrats—elected representatives, presidents, and prime ministers who are the benevolent guardians of freedom. Leaders from these two worlds, we assure ourselves, must be worlds apart! It's a convenient fiction, but a fiction nonetheless.

Withholding information is the essence of tyranny. Control of the flow of information is the tool of the dictatorship.

How did it happen that a republic born of a rebellion against a king and parliament we did not elect has fallen under a tyranny of judges we did not elect?

Kings will be tyrants from policy when subjects are rebels from principle.

rotted down from manhood by their hopeless misery on the isle; wonted to cringe in all things to their lord, himself the worst of slaves; these wretches were now become wholly corrupted to his hands. He used them as creatures of an inferior race; in short, he gaffles his four animals, and makes murderers of them; out of cowards fitly manufacturing bravoes

flight from tyranny does not of itself insure a safe asylum, far less a happy home.

Can't stop a Nazi with a lawbook.

Tocqueville long ago marked as the great weakness of a democracy in his unforgettable phrase, "the tyranny of the majority." The pressure to emulate neighbors, the urge to conform to popular views and manners, the deep fear of being different

So it is to Hitler. He has never moved when he couldn't get away with it.

Well, Hitler's a vagabond, Mussolini's a vagabond, and Stalin's a jailbird. These are new, tough, able, and clever men, straight up from the sewers. Lenin, another jailbird, was the great originator. He

King who feed on your people, since you rule nonentities;

Tyranny is Tyranny let it come from whom it may.

In the province of Cicao on Haiti, where he and his men imagined huge gold fields to exist, they ordered all persons fourteen years or older to collect a certain quantity of gold every three months. When they brought it, they were given copper tokens to hang around their necks. Indians found without a copper token had their hands cut off and bled to death.

a privileged class never surrenders its tyranny, neither can it be expected that the capitalists of this age will give up their rulership without being forced to do it….

Yes, patience. I recall a Bertolt Brecht fable. A man living alone answers a knock at the door. There stands Tyranny, armed and powerful, who asks, "Will you submit?" The man does not reply. He steps aside. Tyranny enters and takes over. The man serves him for years. Then Tyranny mysteriously becomes sick from food poisoning. He dies. The man opens the door, gets rid of the body, comes back to the house, closes the door behind him, and says, firmly, "No.

Sólo los niños, de hecho, piensan que un deseo y su cumplimiento es todo uno: quizás es lo que da a los tiranos ese aire infantil. Alargan la mano hacia lo que no poseen. Cuando topan con la frustración, la rabieta homicida nunca está muy lejos.

For speechless helpless humans, much power lay in a violent switch of extreme emotions. A crude mode of tyranny. Real-world tyrants were often compared to infants.