Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Comment on this quote Share via Email Print this Page [21-40] of 177 Despotism quotesDespotism QuotesDespotism Previous 20 quotes Next 20 quotes I don’t give a goddamn. I’m the President and the Commander-in-Chief. Do it my way. ... Stop throwing the Constitution in my face. It’s just a goddamned piece of paper!~ George W. Bush The world looks as if it has been left in the custody of trolls.~ Father Robert F. Capon Only the history of free peoples is worth our attention; the history of men under a despotism is merely a collection of anecdotes.~ Nicolas-Sebasstien Chamfort The worst tyrants are those which establish themselves in our own breasts.~ William Ellery Channing You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police. Yet in their hearts there is unspoken – unspeakable! – fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts! Words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home, all the more powerful because they are forbidden. These terrify them. A little mouse – a little tiny mouse! – of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic.~ Sir Winston Churchill The power of the Executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgment of his peers, is in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all totalitarian government whether Nazi or Communist.~ Sir Winston Churchill Democracy consists of choosing your dictators, after they've told you what you think it is you want to hear.~ Alan Corenk In order to become the master, the politician poses as the servant.~ Charles de Gaulle However, there is satisfaction in examining what they get out of all this torment, what advantage they derive from all the trouble of their wretched existence. Actually the people never blame the tyrant for the evils they suffer, but they do place responsibility on those who influence him; peoples, nations, all compete with one another, even the peasants, even the tillers of the soil, in mentioning the names of the favorites, in analyzing their vices, and heaping upon them a thousand insults, a thousand obscenities, a thousand maledictions. All their prayers, all their vows are directed against these persons; they hold them accountable for all their misfortunes, their pestilences, their famines; and if at times they show them outward respect, at those very moments they are fuming in their hearts and hold them in greater horror than wild beasts. This is the glory and honor heaped upon influential favorites for their services by people who, if they could tear apart their living bodies, would still clamor for more, only half satiated by the agony they might behold. For even when the favorites are dead those who live after are never too lazy to blacken the names of these people-eaters with the ink of a thousand pens, tear their reputations into bits in a thousand books, and drag, so to speak, their bones past posterity, forever punishing them after their death for their wicked lives.~ Estienne de la Boétie True, it is evil that a single man should crush the herd, but see not there the worse form of slavery, which is when the herd crushes out the man.~ Antoine De Saint-Exupery In republican governments, men are all equal; equal they are also in despotic governments: in the former, because they are everything; in the latter, because they are nothing.~ Charles-Louis de Secondat [Some people] have a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to lower the powerful to their own level, and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom. I believe that it is easier to establish an absolute and despotic government amongst a people in which the conditions of society are equal, than amongst any other; and I think that, if such a government were once established amongst such a people, it would not only oppress men, but would eventually strip each of them of several of the highest qualities of humanity. Despotism, therefore, appears to me peculiarly to be dreaded in democratic times.~ Alexis de Tocqueville But, when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.~ Declaration of Independence Those in power need checks and restraints lest they come to identify the common good for their own tastes and desires, and their continuation in office as essential to the preservation of the nation.~ Justice William O. Douglas A people who extend civil liberties only to preferred groups start down the path either to dictatorship of the right or the left.~ William O. Douglas Let us render the tyrant no aid; let us not hold the light by which he can trace the footprints of our flying brother.~ Frederick Douglass [W]e continue to evolve a cute little concept of a changing legal accommodation named the “Living Constitution Theory” which is only a perversion stating, “To heck with what our Constitution says; we in power will twist it to suit our ideas anytime and every time we so choose.”~ Dr. Jack Down It is the growing custom to narrow control, concentrate power, disregard and disfranchise the public; and assuming that certain powers by divine right of money-raising or by sheer assumption, have the power to do as they think best without consulting the wisdom of mankind.~ W. E. B. Du Bois Rogues are preferable to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.~ Alexandre Dumas A court which yields to the popular will thereby licenses itself to practice despotism, for there can be no assurance that it will not on another occasion indulge its own will.~ Felix Frankfurter Previous 20 quotes Next 20 quotes Share on Facebook Tweet Email Print