Quotes About Autocracy

Chinese communism lies the world's longest tradition of successful autocracy.

The disruptive powers of excessive national fecundity may have played a greater part in bursting the bonds of convention than either the power of ideas or the errors of autocracy.

never in history, past or present, had an autocratic regime handed over power with so little upheaval or bloodshed.

No autocratic government could be trusted to keep faith within it or observe its covenants. It must be a league of honor, a partnership of opinion . . . Only free peoples can hold their purpose and their honor steady to a common end and prefer the interests of mankind to any narrow interest of their own.

Dictatorship is the power relying upon force unbound by any laws.

Even a moderniser like Alexander II - who emancipated the serfs in 1861 - had no intention of devolving real power.

A country governed by a despot is an inverted cone.

Degeneracy follows every autocratic system of violence, for violence inevitably attracts moral inferiors. Time has proven that illustrious tyrants are succeeded by scoundrels.

Creon: My voice is the one voice giving orders in this city! Haimon: It is no city if it takes orders from one voice. Creon: The State is the King! Haimon: Yes, if the State is a desert.

In an ordinary despotism, the powers of a despot are limited by his bodily capacity, and by the calls of pleasure; he is but one man; there are but twelve hours in his day, and he is not disposed to employ more than a small part in dull business; he keeps the rest for the court, or the harem, or for society.

The Brunswick Manifesto, rather than accomplishing Louis XVI's rescue, paved the way to the guillotine, which could have been foreseen if Karl Wilhelm had given the matter any forethought, but thinking ahead is given to chess players, not to autocrats.

I do not want history to record me as someone who has bequeathed to his nation the institution of despotism.

The fallacy is to believe that under a dictatorial government you can be free inside.

Sometimes it's better to have a benign dictator than a dumb democracy, to be honest.

we took the simple step of illegalising all opposition. And the autobahn to autocracy lay clear.

The Bible's claim to truth is not only far more urgent than Homer's, it is tyrannical—it excludes all other claims. The world of the Scripture stories is not satisfied with claiming to be a historically true reality—it insists that it is the only real world, is destined for autocracy.

We have buried the putrid corpse of liberty

Of all political curses the most terrible is an assembly that is but the instrument of a single man.

Trump's attacks against the judiciary reflect his view that only he should be able to decide what he can and cannot do.

I actually bought the argument that if we democratized Iraq, we could create a space for venting some of the stuff that's going on in the Middle East in these autocratic regimes that is expressing itself through jihadism, because it has nowhere else to express itself.

Aside from the occasional genocide, oppression, evil and torture, etc., it is inarguable that public policy could be implemented more rapidly in an autocracy.

In some ways the soviets simplified who the enemy was", Havel said, "Today autocrats are more sophisticated, they stand for election while slowly undermining institutions that make democracy possible. They champion free markets while engaging with the same corruption cronyism and exploitation that existed in the past.

Almost all rightists believed that autocracy ipso facto ruled out opposition, which of course ruled out their own opposition.

For some, including Nicholas II, the mere existence of a prime minister was an affront to autocracy.63