Quotes About Dictators

You don't reason with men like Hitler.

Here is my advice as we begin the century that will lead to 2081. First, guard the freedom of ideas at all costs. Be alert that dictators have always played on the natural human tendency to blame others and to oversimplify. And don't regard yourself as a guardian of freedom unless you respect and preserve the rights of people you disagree with to free, public, unhampered expression.

El triunfo de los dictadores es consecuencia de tres fracasos: de la filosofía, de la religión, del capitalismo democrático.

Zamiatine era um oráculo, e não se dirigia simplesmente a Estaline: espicaçava todos os ditadores por vir, tanto os oligarcas de Silicon Valley como os mandarins do partido único chinês.

To understand why dictators fall, it helps to recognise factors that produce a perfect anti-dictatorial storm. Barring missteps such as those that led to Gaddafi's undoing, a dictator's survival can be at risk because of newness in office, poor health, or old age combined with economic trouble.

The Arab Spring showed that people are not going to wait for an American president to make good on his big talk about democracy and human rights; they are going to fight for those rights themselves and overthrow pro-American dictators who stand in their way.

I don't think it's hypothetical whether or not it's a good idea to topple secular dictators in the Middle East and hope to get a good outcome and hope that stability comes thereafter.

Antisemitism is unique among religious hatreds. It is a racist conspiracy theory fashioned for the needs of messianic and brutal rulers, as dictators from the Tsars to the Islamists via the Nazis have shown. Many other alleged religious 'hatreds' are not hatreds in the true sense. If I criticise Islamic, Orthodox Jewish or Catholic attitudes towards women, for instance, and I'm accused of being a bigot, I shrug and say it is not bigoted to oppose bigotry.

Come la famiglia universale degli scrittori di talento supera le barriere nazionali, così il lettore dotato è una figura universale, non soggetta a leggi spaziali o temporali. È lui - il buon lettore, l'eccellente lettore - che ha salvato più e più volte l'artista dalla distruzione per mano degli imperatori, dei dittatori, dei preti, dei puritani, dei filistei, dei politici, dei poliziotti, dei direttori delle poste e dei pedanti.

A universal draft is most often the instrument of Third World dictators.

If we want to protect people against dictators or repression or torture, don't you need that rule to be universal so as to not end up with a situation where we do so only when it is comfortable, profitable and safe?

If you want to preserve - I'm very serious now - if you want to preserve democracy as we know it, you have to have a free and many times adversarial press. And without it, I am afraid that we would lose so much of our individual liberties over time. That's how dictators get started.

Dictators free themselves, but they enslave the people.

It may seem a paradox, but it is none the less the simple truth, to say that on the contrary, the decisive historical events take place among us, the anonymous masses. The most powerful dictators, ministers and generals are powerless against the simultaneous mass decisions taken individually and almost unconsciously by the population at large.

The all but unanimous judgment seems to be that we, the democracies, are just as responsible for the rise of the dictators as the dictatorships themselves, and perhaps more so.

Dictators, unlike Democrats, depend on a small coterie to sustain their power. These backers, generally drawn from the military, the senior civil service, and family or clan members, have a synergistic relationship with their dictator. The dictator delivers opportunities for them to become rich, and they protect him from being overthrown.

It's time to bury the unreal, failed 'realism' of those who have long thought that dictators brought stability.

Dictators have an old trick to assess the strength of their opposition: they say something patently untrue, and then look to see who mindlessly repeats it. Those who do, they recognise as their true supporters.

The uprising in Egypt was initiated by the young generation. The uprising achieved two things. One is it made the lives of dictators impossible. Today, if you are looking for a safe job, don't become a dictator.

Dictating to dictators doesn't work; they are congenitally delusional about their own indispensability.

It is not patriotic to admire foreign dictators. It

A gigantic crowd of one million persons was gathered on the Maifeld to hear the two fascist dictators speak their pieces. Mussolini, orating in German, was carried away by the deafening applause—and by Hitler's flattering words.

But clothing themselves in the trappings of democracy, dictators may, like drag queens, tend to overdo it, and Napoleon wanted there to be no doubt that his French Republic was more democratic than any before it.

There would have been no need for Fidel to start a revolution in the first place. It's a dismal pattern that has been repeated over and over again in the decades since Batista fled, with the United States propping up a string of appalling dictators in Iran, Vietnam, Chile, and Panama, to name a few. The tragedy is that it has almost always led to disastrous results. By betraying its own principles, the United States has also managed to defeat its most basic strategic goals.