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Tyranny is yielding to the lust of the governing.
-Lord Moulton
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One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution in order to establish a dictatorship.
-George Orwell
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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 people always have some champion whom they set over them and nurse into greatness. This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector.
-Plato
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The nose of a mob is its imagination. By this, at any time, it can be quietly led.
-Edgar Allan Poe
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Like Cato, give his little senate laws, and sit attentive to his own applause.
-Alexander Pope
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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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Rulers, who neither see, nor feel, nor know, but leech-like to their fainting country cling, till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow, -- a people starved and stabbed in the untilled field...
-Percy Bysshe Shelley
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In inner-party politics, these methods lead, as we shall yet see, to this: the party organization substitutes itself for the party, the central committee substitutes itself for the organization, and, finally, a dictator substitutes himself for the central committee.
-Leon Trotsky
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Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.
-Harry S Truman
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The tumultuous populace of large cities are ever to be dreaded. Their indiscriminate violence prostrates for the time all public authority, and its consequences are sometimes extensive and terrible.
-George Washington
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The real stumbling-block of totalitarian r?gimes is not the spiritual need of men for freedom of thought; it is men's inability to stand the physical and nervous strain of a permanent state of excitement, except during a few years of their youth.
-Simone Weil
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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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There are three kinds of despots. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the body. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the soul. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the soul and body alike. The first is called the Prince. The second is called the Pope. The third is called the People.
-Oscar Wilde
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Despotism is unjust to everybody, including the despot, who was probably made for better things.
-Oscar Wilde
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Better the rule of One, whom all obey, than to let clamorous demagogues betray our freedom with the kiss of anarchy.
-Oscar Wilde
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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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Books about Tyranny
