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Dictators never invent their own opportunities.
-Richard Buckminster Fuller
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People who live in the post-totalitarian system know only too well that the question of whether one or several political parties are in power, and how these parties define and label themselves, is of far less importance than the question of whether or not it is possible to live like a human being.
-Vaclav Havel
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Because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything. It falsifies the past. It falsifies the present, and it falsifies the future. It falsifies statistics. It pretends not to possess an omnipotent and unprincipled police apparatus. It pretends to respect human rights. It pretends to prosecute no one. It pretends to fear nothing. It pretends to pretend nothing.
-Vaclav Havel
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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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A dictatorship is a country where they have taken the politics out of the politics.
-Samuel Himmel
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There is a totalitarian regime inside every one of us. We are ruled by a ruthless politburo which sets our norms and drives us from one five-year plan to another. The autonomous individual who has to justify his existence by his own efforts is in eternal bondage to himself.
-Eric Hoffer
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The savior who wants to turn men into angels is as much a hater of human nature as the totalitarian despot who wants to turn them into puppets.
-Eric Hoffer
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Despots play their part in the works of thinkers. Fettered words are terrible words. The writer doubles and trebles the power of his writing when a ruler imposes silence on the people. Something emerges from that enforced silence, a mysterious fullness which filters through and becomes steely in the thought. Repression in history leads to conciseness in the historian, and the rocklike hardness of much celebrated prose is due to the tempering of the tyrant.
-Victor Hugo
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Man is more disposed to domination than freedom; and a structure of dominion not only gladdens the eye of the master who rears and protects it, but even its servants are uplifted by the thought that they are members of a whole, which rises high above the life and strength of single generations.
-Karl Wilhelm Von Humboldt
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So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, the Caesars and Napoleons will arise to make them miserable.
-Aldous Huxley
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Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God.
-Thomas Jefferson
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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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The poor suffer twice at the rioter's hands. First, his destructive fury scars their neighborhood; second, the atmosphere of accommodation and consent is changed to one of hostility and resentment.
-Lyndon B. Johnson
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A rioter with a Molotov cocktail in his hands is not fighting for civil rights any more than a Klansman with a sheet on his back and a mask on his face.
-Lyndon B. Johnson
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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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A police state finds that it cannot command the grain to grow.
-John Fitzgerald Kennedy
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The tyrant dies and his rule is over, the martyr dies and his rule begins.
-Soren Kierkegaard
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The only successful revolution of this century is totalitarianism.
-Bernard-Henri Levy
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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 Los Angeles riots were not caused by the Rodney King verdict. The Los Angeles riots were caused by rioters.
-Rush Limbaugh
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Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element. Public life gradually falls asleep, a few dozen party leaders of inexhaustible energy and boundless experience direct and rule. Such conditions must inevitably cause a brutalization of public life: attempted assassinations, shootings of hostages, etc.
-Rosa Luxemburg
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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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Man is insatiable for power; he is infantile in his desires and, always discontented with what he has, loves only what he has not. People complain of the despotism of princes; they ought to complain of the despotism of man.
-Joseph De Maistre
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Dictators always look good until the last minutes.
-Tomas G. Masaryk
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If we resort to lawlessness, the only thing we can hope for is civil war, untold bloodshed, and the end of our dreams.
-Archie Lee Moore
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Books about Tyranny
