Quotes About Tyranny

We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.

We have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth and, if necessary, the selfish memes of our indoctrination. . . . We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.

We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.

the closing words of my first book, 'We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.

It took from 1967 to 2003—over three decades—to build the big men. It took a decade—2003 to 2013—to destroy them. I suspect a new generation of big men will return. No people can tolerate chaos forever. Dictators will offer a way out and many of the exhausted and brutalized people of the Middle East will accept them, and I suspect Washington will as well.

Part of running a successful tyranny is knowing when and how to let your subjects off the leash

She said, I have no excuses, least of all for God. Like all tyrants, he is not worthy of the spit you would waste on negotiations. The deal we have is infinitely simpler—I don't call him to account, and he extends me the same courtesy.

Part of running a successful tyranny is knowing when and how to let your subjects off the leash, and at this the First Families were accomplished masters.

You can't love someone without imaginative sympathy, without beginning to see the world from another point of view. You can't be a good lover, a good artist or a good politician without this capacity (you can get away with it, but that's not what I mean). Show me the tyrants who have been great lovers.

History is a raw onion sandwich, it just repeats, it burps. We've seen it again and again this year. Same old story, Same old oscillation between tyranny and rebellion, war and peace, prosperity and impoverishment

History is a raw onion sandwich, sir." "For what reason?" "It just repeats, sir. It burps. We've seen it again and again this year. Same old story, same old oscillation between tyranny and rebellion, war and peace, prosperity and impoverishment.

Not for the last time she was struck by the tyranny of the socially inept. Endless effort is harnessed to a sluggish and boring conversation simply to preserve these dullards from a sense of their inadequacy. The irony being that they are quite impervious to their own shortcomings.

of an aspiring dictator. The gravest peril will come if the mob and the dictator unite.

That's how tyranny succeeds. When folks think it won't affect them until eventually it does.

No eunuch flatters his tyrant more shamefully or seeks by more infamous means to stimulate his jaded appetite, in order to gain some favor, than does the eunuch of industry, the entrepreneur, in order to acquire a few silver coins or to charm the gold from the purse of his dearly beloved neighbor.

Mean king Ahab kept on being mean.

The willing sacrifice of the innocents is the most powerful retort to insolent tyranny that has yet to be conceived by God or man.

In tyranny lies only failure. Empower every man and you will gain strength.

Absolute discretion is a ruthless master. It is more destructive of freedom than any of man's other inventions.

Whenever all men are...hastening to be slaves or tyrants we make Liberalism the prime bogey.

History has informed us that bodies of men as well as individuals are susceptible of the spirit of tyranny.

Tyranny destroys or strengthens the individual; freedom enervates him, until he becomes no more than a puppet. Man has more chances of saving himself by hell than by paradise.

Men in England are ruled, at this minute by the clock, by brutes who refuse them bread, by liars who refuse them news, and by fools who cannot govern, and therefore wish to enslave.

[Tyranny is] to compel men not to think as they do, to compel men to express thoughts that are not their own.