Quotation Matches:
 
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Jules: The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he, who in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother's keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who would attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know my name is the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon thee.
Ezekiel 25:17
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(no category)
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If one man can be allowed to determine for himself what is law, every man can. That means first chaos, then tyranny. Legal process is an essential part of the democratic process.
-Felix Frankfurter
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As it was 189 years ago, so today the cause of America is a revolutionary cause. And I am proud this morning to salute you as fellow revolutionaries. Neither you nor I are willing to accept the tyranny of poverty, nor the dictatorship of ignorance, nor the despotism of ill health, nor the oppression of bias and prejudice and bigotry. We want change. We want progress. We want it both abroad and at homeand we aim to get it.
-Lyndon B. Johnson
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Now the trumpet summons us againnot as a call to bear arms, though arms we neednot as a call to battle, though embattled we arebut a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulationa struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease and war itself.
-John Fitzgerald Kennedy
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The world has never had a good definition of the word liberty, and the American people, just now, are much in want of one. We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other mens labor. Here are two, not only different, but incompatable things, called by the same nameliberty. And it follows that each of the things is, by the respective parties, called by two different and incompatable namesliberty and tyranny.
-Abraham Lincoln
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What constitutes the bulwark of our own liberty and independence? It is not our frowning battlements, our bristling sea coasts, the guns of our war steamers, or the strength of our gallant and disciplined army. These are not our reliance against a resumption of tyranny in our fair land. All of them may be turned against our liberties, without making us stronger or weaker for the struggle. Our reliance is in the love of liberty which God has planted in our bosoms. Our defense is in the preservation of the spirit which prizes liberty as the heritage of all men, in all lands, every where. Destroy this spirit, and you have planted the seeds of despotism around your own doors.
-Abraham Lincoln
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Adversity
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These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly; it is dearness only that gives everything its value. I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress and grow brave by reflection. 'Tis the business of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death.
-Thomas Paine, The Crisis, 1776
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Art
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A primary function of art and thought is to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture in the environmental sense and to permit him to stand beyond it in an autonomy of perception and judgment.
-Lionel Trilling
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Beauty
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Beauty is a short-lived tyranny.
-Socrates
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To give pain is the tyranny; to make happy, the true empire of beauty.
-Sir Richard Steele
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Capitalism
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Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate.
-Bertrand Russell
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Compromise
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Compromise, hell! ... If freedom is right and tyranny is wrong, why should those who believe in freedom treat it as if it were a roll of bologna to be bartered a slice at a time?
-Senator Jesse Helms
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Death
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Fear of death has been the greatest ally of tyranny past and present.
-Sydney Hook
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Democracy
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The one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the majority.
-Lord (John Emerich Edward Dalberg) Acton
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It is a besetting vice of democracies to substitute public opinion for law. This is the usual form in which masses of men exhibit their tyranny.
-James Fenimore Cooper
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A modern democracy is a tyranny whose borders are undefined; one discovers how far one can go only by traveling in a straight line until one is stopped.
-Norman Mailer
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It is the American vice, the democratic disease which expresses its tyranny by reducing everything unique to the level of the herd.
-Henry Miller
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Discovery
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Then hail! thou noble conqueror! That, when tyranny oppressed, hewed for our fathers from the wild. A land wherein to rest.
-Mary Elizabeth Hewitt
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Dreams
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America has been a land of dreams. A land where the aspirations of people from countries cluttered with rich, cumbersome, aristocratic, ideological pasts can reach for what once seemed unattainable. Here they have tried to make dreams come true. Yet now... we are threatened by a new and particularly American menace. It is not the menace of class war, of ideology, of poverty, of disease, of illiteracy, or demagoguery, or of tyranny, though these now plague most of the world. It is the menace of unreality.
-Daniel J. Boorstin
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Education
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Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.
-Thomas Jefferson
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Face, Faces
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It has to be displayed, this face, on a more or less horizontal plane. Imagine a man wearing a mask, and imagine that the elastic which holds the mask on has just broken, so that the man (rather than let the mask slip off) has to tilt his head back and balance the mask on his real face. This is the kind of tyranny which Lawson's face exerts over the rest of his body as he cruises along the corridors. He doesn't look down his nose at you, he looks along his nose.
-James Fenton
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Facts
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I often wish that I could rid the world of the tyranny of facts. What are facts but compromises? A fact merely marks the point where we have agreed to let investigation cease.
-Source Unknown
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Freedom
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How is freedom measured, in individuals as in nations? By the resistance which has to be overcome, by the effort it costs to stay aloft. One would have to seek the highest type of free man where the greatest resistance is constantly being overcome: five steps from tyranny, near the threshold of the danger of servitude.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
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One should respect public opinion in so far as is necessary to avoid starvation and to keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.
-Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness, 1930
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Government
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You see, you all start with the premise that democracy is some good. I don't think it's worth a damn. I think Churchill is right, the only thing to be said for democracy is that there is nothing else that's any better, and therefore he used to say, Tyranny tempered by assassination, but lots of assassination. People say, If the Congress were more representative of the people it would be better. I say the Congress is too damn representative. It's just as stupid as the people are; just as uneducated, just as dumb, just as selfish. You know the Congress is a perfect example, and created to be a perfect example.
http://www.trumanlibrary.org/oralhist/acheson.htm
-Dean Acheson, interview with Theodore A. Wilson and Richard D. McKinzie, June 30, 1971
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In a healthy nation there is a kind of dramatic balance between the will of the people and the government, which prevents its degeneration into tyranny.
-Albert Einstein
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When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.
-Thomas Jefferson
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The best government is a benevolent tyranny tempered by an occasional assassination.
-Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet)
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Gun Control
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The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.
-Thomas Jefferson
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Ideology
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The great battleground for the defense and expansion of freedom today is the whole southern half of the globe... the lands of the rising peoples. Their revolution is the greatest in human history. They seek an end to injustice, tyranny and exploitation. More than an end, they seek a beginning.
-John Fitzgerald Kennedy
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Law
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Bad laws are the worst form of tyranny.
-Edmund Burke
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Where the law ends tyranny begins.
-Henry Fielding
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Mercy
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There are three things in the world that deserve no mercy, hypocrisy, fraud, and tyranny.
-Frederick William Robertson
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Mind, the
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There are few minds to which tyranny is not delightful.
-Samuel Johnson
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Minorities
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Beware the tyranny of the minority.
-Proverb
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Morals
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To set up as a standard of public morality a notion which can neither be defined nor conceived is to open the door to every kind of tyranny.
-Simone Weil
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Myths, Mythology
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Myths and legends die hard in America. We love them for the extra dimension they provide, the illusion of near-infinite possibility to erase the narrow confines of most men's reality. Weird heroes and mould-breaking champions exist as living proof to those who need it that the tyranny of the rat race is not yet final.
-Hunter S. Thompson
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Oppression
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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.
-E. M. Cioran
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When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know, the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, - not anything - you can't conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him.
-Robert A. Heinlein, If This Goes On, Revolt in 2100
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Parliament
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You see how this House of Commons has begun to verify all the ill prophecies that were made of it -- low, vulgar, meddling with everything, assuming universal competency, and flattering every base passion -- and sneering at everything noble refined and truly national. The direct tyranny will come on by and by, after it shall have gratified the multitude with the spoil and ruin of the old institutions of the land.
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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Personality
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Temperament lies behind mood; behind will, lies the fate of character. Then behind both, the influence of family the tyranny of culture; and finally the power of climate and environment; and we are free, only to the extent we rise above these.
-John Burroughs
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Poetry
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We read poetry because the poets, like ourselves, have been haunted by the inescapable tyranny of time and death; have suffered the pain of loss, and the more wearing, continuous pain of frustration and failure; and have had moods of unlooked-for release and peace. They have known and watched in themselves and others.
-Elizabeth Drew
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Politics
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I am really sorry to see my countrymen trouble themselves about politics. If men were wise, the most arbitrary princes could not hurt them. If they are not wise, the freest government is compelled to be a tyranny. Princes appear to me to be fools. Houses of Commons and Houses of Lords appear to me to be fools; they seem to me to be something else besides human life.
-William Blake
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Power
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Authority and power are two different things: power is the force by means of which you can oblige others to obey you. Authority is the right to direct and command, to be listened to or obeyed by others. Authority requests power. Power without authority is tyranny.
-Jacques Maritain
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Racism
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The first who attracts the eye, the first in enlightenment, in power and in happiness, is the white man, the European, man par excellence; below him appear the Negro and the Indian. These two unfortunate races have neither birth, nor face, nor language, nor mores in common; only their misfortunes look alike. Both occupy an equally inferior position in the country that they inhabit; both experience the effects of tyranny; and if their miseries are different, they can accuse the same author for them.
-Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
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Reason
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No cause is left but the most ancient of all, the one, in fact, that from the beginning of our history has determined the very existence of politics, the cause of freedom versus tyranny.
-Hannah Arendt
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Religion
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The first revolt is against the supreme tyranny of theology, of the phantom of God. As long as we have a master in heaven, we will be slaves on earth.
-Mikhail Bakunin
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And of all plagues with which mankind are cursed, ecclesiastic tyranny's the worst.
-Daniel Defoe
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Revolution
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Revolutions have never lightened the burden of tyranny: they have only shifted it to another shoulder.
-George Bernard Shaw
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Science
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To expect that the intricacies of science will be pierced by a careless glance, or the eminences of fame ascended without labour, is to expect a peculiar privilege, a power denied to the rest of mankind; but to suppose that the maze is inscrutable to diligence, or the heights inaccessible to perseverance, is to submit tamely to the tyranny of fancy, and enchain the mind in voluntary shackles.
-Samuel Johnson
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Sex
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Sexism is the foundation on which all tyranny is built. Every social form of hierarchy and abuse is modeled on male-over-female domination.
-Andrea Dworkin
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Tyranny
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No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets.
-Edward Abbey
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Death is softer by far than tyranny.
-Aeschylus
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The tyranny of majorities may be as bad as the tyranny of kings.
-Arthur Balfour
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Tyranny and anarchy are never far apart.
-Jeremy Bentham
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No totalitarians, no wars, no fears, famines or perils of any kind can really break a man's spirit until he breaks it himself by surrendering. Tyranny has many dread powers, but not the power to rule the spirit.
-Edgar Sheffield Brightman
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The tyranny of a multitude is a multiplied tyranny.
-Edmund Burke
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There is a secret pride in every human heart that revolts at tyranny. You may order and drive an individual, but you cannot make him respect you.
-William Hazlitt
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I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.
-Thomas Jefferson
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No government power can be abused long. Mankind will not bear it. There is a remedy in human nature against tyranny, that will keep us safe under every form of government.
-Samuel Johnson
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Of all tyrannies a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
-C.S. Lewis
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The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.
-James Madison
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Tyranny is yielding to the lust of the governing.
-Lord Moulton
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Tyranny is always better organized than freedom.
-Charles Peguy
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Dictatorship naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme liberty.
-Plato
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The common good of a collective -- a race, a class, a state -- was the claim and justification of every tyranny ever established over men. Every major horror of history was committed in the name of an altruistic motive. Has any act of selfishness ever equaled the carnage perpetrated by disciples of altruism? Does the fault lie in men's hypocrisy or in the nature of the principle? The most dreadful butchers were the most sincere. The believed in the perfect society reached through the guillotine and the firing squad. Nobody questioned their right to murder since they were murdering for an altruistic purpose. It was accepted that man must be sacrificed for other men. Actors change, but the course of the tragedy remains the same. A humanitarian who starts with the declarations of love for mankind and ends with a sea of blood. It goes on and will go on so long as men believe that an action is good if it is unselfish. That permits the altruist to act and forces his victims to bear it. The leaders of collectivist movements ask nothing of themselves. But observe the results.
-Ayn Rand
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There is no week nor day nor hour when tyranny may not enter upon this country, if the people lose their roughness and spirit of defiance.
-Walt Whitman
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The worst form of tyranny the world has ever known the tyranny of the weak over the strong. It is the only tyranny that lasts.
-Oscar Wilde
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Unity
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The multitude which is not brought to act as a unity, is confusion. That unity which has not its origin in the multitude is tyranny.
-Blaise Pascal
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Any unity which doesn't have its origin in the multitudes is tyranny.
-Blaise Pascal
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Women
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Impenetrable in their dissimulation, cruel in their vengeance, tenacious in their purposes, unscrupulous as to their methods, animated by profound and hidden hatred for the tyranny of man -- it is as though there exists among them an ever-present conspiracy toward domination, a sort of alliance like that subsisting among the priests of every country.
-Denis Diderot
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