Quotes About Dictatorship

Political dictatorships take possession not just of money and belongings but of narrative.

Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.

Aren't we at the point where the closer we get to chaos, the more concern that there should be about coming to the table and compromising with Democrats? This is not leadership. This is almost like dictatorship.

I cannot think of a tactical alliance with the Left because I represent the idea that there is a peaceful, nonviolent way to dislodge a dictatorship... A tactical Left alliance damages my argument. If I succeed with them, we will never know if peace can really produce freedom.

To Westerners, the students at Tiananmen may have given an impression of a solid and energetic consensus against dictatorship and for democracy, but they were an egotistical and fractious lot, riven by disagreements over tactics and money.

Reading 'Animal Farm' set me free from the dictatorship in my head. I could see all the tactics used by the regime to control us - they were all in that book.

I grew up in Taiwan, which was a military dictatorship.

I've heard directing talked about as being a benign dictatorship, and I think that's probably the best way a director should be. They're open to collaboration and feedback from people, but ultimately, it's got to be that one person's vision. That's what I think makes a film really stand out.

For in public life you aren't free to act on your inclinations or even your principles: in order to acquire power you have to forfeit free-will, which seems rather paradoxical. And how much more so must it be in a dictatorship! A man like Lenin must have about as much choice and freedom of action as the topmost acrobat in a human pyramid

Of all the things that made the Third Reich a modern dictatorship, its incessant demand for popular legitimation was one of the most striking.

Some authors have argued that a direct historical line can be drawn to Nazism from the French Revolution of 1789, the Jacobin 'Reign of Terror' in 1793-4, and the implicit idea of a popular dictatorship in Rousseau's theory of the 'General Will', decided initially by the people but brooking no opposition once resolved upon.139

To serve a dictator, one must be gullible and ambitious and have no scruples. One must not mind being insulted by a Führer or else have an intellect so deficient as not to notice insults. Who else would fawningly and forever feed the vanity of a man who never listened but only spouted inane theories of conquest, racism, and economic nonsense, no matter how hypnotic his delivery?

Duke of Athens, who made himself the dictator of Florence until he was overthrown in 1343 by a mob which killed and ate one of the Duke's lieutenants in the Piazza della Signoria.

I dreamed I called Adolf Hitler on the phone and asked him. What was your gimmick? They believed it was wiser to obey anyone, even me, than to risk anarchy, he said with a ghoulish laugh. And the line went dead with a sharp click like boot-heels snapped together.

There is no government, no industrial-military complex, no economic system, no mass media that can ever reduce us to puppets and robots as thoroughly as the biological and environmental dictatorships have. — F.M. Esfandiary, Upwingers

simply because a nation is a democracy does not mean that its foreign policy will necessarily turn out to be better or more enlightened than that of a dictatorship.

The small Hitlers are around us every day.

Political dictatorship and social hopelessness create the desperation that fuels religious extremism.

There is an absolutely fundamental hostility on the part of totalitarian regimes toward religion.

Big Data algorithms might create digital dictatorships in which all power is concentrated in the hands of a tiny elite while most people suffer not from exploitation, but from something far worse – irrelevance.

In the late twentieth century democracies usually outperformed dictatorships because democracies were better at data processing.

Sapiens by contrast is more like a banana republic dictator.

And what are the characteristics that evolved in humans? 'Life', certainly. But 'liberty'? There is no such thing in biology. Just like equality, rights and limited liability companies, liberty is something that people invented and that exists only in their imagination. From a biological viewpoint, it is meaningless to say that humans in democratic societies are free, whereas humans in dictatorships are unfree.

In the late 20th century democracies usually outperformed dictatorships because of democracies were better at data processing. A democracy diffuses the power to process information and make decisions among many people and institutions, whereas a dictatorship concentrates information and power in one place.