Best 276 quotes in «tyranny quotes» category

Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude.

No nation can say, 'We will capitulate to tyranny rather than accept a speculative fate - to accept an absolute fate in alternative to a speculative one' - no nation can do that.

People get good gigs because they stand up....You don't get picked. Reject the tyranny of picked. Pick yourself.

None but tyrants have any business to be afraid.

Once you get a tyranny, you don't easily get rid of it. Much better to remember about eternal vigilance.

No tyrant need fear till men begin to feel confident in each other.

Plurality which is not reduced to unity is confusion; unity which does not depend on plurality is tyranny.

Power without wisdom is tyranny; wisdom without power is pointless.

Power never takes a back step only in the face of more power.

Speak against unconscious oppression, Speak against the tyranny of the unimaginative, Speak against bonds.

Relativism poses as freedom but it is just another form of tyranny: You must believe that all religions are equal because we say they are. You must agree with us that everything is relative, or we will punish you.

Socialism is just another form of tyranny.

The hardest task needs the lightest hand or else its completion will not lead to freedom but to a tyranny much worse than the one it replaces.

The freedom to kill is not a true freedom, but a tyranny that reduces human beings to slavery.

Taxation without representation is tyranny.

The Postmodernists' tyranny wears people down by boredom and semi-literate prose.

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.

The Party is not interested in the overt act. The thought is all we care about.

Treachery is noble when aimed at tyranny.

The purpose of education is to free the student from the tyranny of the present.

The terrible tyranny of the majority.

The tyranny of a multitude is a multiplied tyranny.

They [Americans] augur misgovernment at a distance and snuff the approach of tyranny in every tainted breeze.

Tremble, ye tyrants, for ye can not die.

The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny.

Tis time to fear when tyrants seem to kiss.

To say that we have to surrender to judicial supremacy is to do what Jefferson warned against, which is, in essence, surrender to judicial tyranny.

truth ... is the first casualty of tyranny.

Tyranny is usually tempered with assassination, and Democracy must be tempered with culture. In the absence of this, it turns into a representation of collective folly.

Tyranny and anarchy are never far apart.

Tyranny knows no restraint of appetite.

Twixt kings and tyrants there's this difference known; Kings seek their subjects' good: tyrants their own.

Tyrants are seldom free; the cares and the instruments of their tyranny enslave them.

We have only one alternative: either to build a functioning industrial society or see freedom itself disappear in anarchy and tyranny.

We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.

What is more cruel than a tyrant's ear?

Whenever one tries to suppress doubt , there is tyranny .

When more Americans prefer freebies to freedom, these great United States will become a fertile ground for tyranny.

A city which belongs to just one man is no true city

When tyranny becomes law, rebellion becomes duty.

ABYSS Our country lives Among the dead And dies among the living Sometimes.

When one person can initiate war, by its definition, a republic no longer exists.

When tyranny becomes law, rebellion is a right.

All the enormous machines that keep full Citizens comfortable far above us in their glittering towers, all the infrastructure of power, of fuel, of commerce and industry—all of it happens below. Made possible with our hands. With our bodies. With our lives. I would have done anything to escape. I got my chance. I made it out—but the price was loneliness.

Luther's personality as well as his teachings shows ambivalence toward authority. On the one hand he is overawed by authority—that of a worldly authority and that of a tyrannical God—and on the other hand he rebels against authority—that of the Church. He shows the same ambivalence in his attitude toward the masses. As far as they rebel within the limits he has set he is with them. But when they attack the authorities he approves of, an intense hatred and contempt for the masses comes to the fore. […] we shall show that this simultaneous love for authority and the hatred against those who are powerless are typical traits of the "authoritarian character.

Among the Kimbrii the greatest shame a person can bring to himself or his clan is to start a war, but the second greatest is to submit to tyranny or injustice without a fight.

A nationalist...is not at all the same thing as a patriot. A nationalist encourages us to be our worst, and then tells us that we are the best.

An old Russian proverb . . . "Where hangs the smoke of hate burns a fiercer fire called fear." The trick . . . was to keep that fire alive, but to know at the same time it might consume you also. Then the trick was to make the fear invisible in the smokes of hatred. Having accomplished that, you would own men's souls and your power would be absolute, so long as you never allowed men to see that their hate was but fear, and so long as you, afraid, knowing it, hence more shrewd and cautious than the rest, did not become a corpse at the hands of the hating fearful. There, in a nutshell, was the recipe for dictatorship. Over the proletariat. Over the godly believers. Over the heathen. Over all men, even those who imagined they were free and yet could be made to hate. Frighten; then furnish the whipping boys. Then seize.

And I'll close by saying this. Because anti-Semitism is the godfather of racism and the gateway to tyranny and fascism and war, it is to be regarded not as the enemy of the Jewish people, I learned, but as the common enemy of humanity and of civilisation, and has to be fought against very tenaciously for that reason, most especially in its current, most virulent form of Islamic Jihad. Daniel Pearl's revolting murderer was educated at the London School of Economics. Our Christmas bomber over Detroit was from a neighboring London college, the chair of the Islamic Students' Society. Many pogroms against Jewish people are being reported from all over Europe today as I'm talking, and we can only expect this to get worse, and we must make sure our own defenses are not neglected. Our task is to call this filthy thing, this plague, this—this pest, by its right name; to make unceasing resistance to it, knowing all the time that it's probably ultimately ineradicable, and bearing in mind that its hatred towards us is a compliment, and resolving (some of the time, at any rate) to do a bit more to deserve it. Thank you.

And that’s the terrible myth of organized society. That everything that’s done through the established system is legal. And that word has a powerful psychological impact. It makes people believe that there is an order to life and an order to a system. And that a person who goes through this order and is convicted has gotten all that is due him and therefore society can turn its conscious off and look to other things and other times. And that’s the terrible thing about these past trials that they have this aura of legitimacy an aura of legality. I suspect that better men than the world has known and more of them have gone to their deaths through a legal system then through all the illegalities in the history of man. Six million people in Europe during the Third Reich, legal, Sacco and Vanzetti, quite legal, the Haymarket defendants, legal, the hundreds of rape trials throughout the south where black men were condemned to death all legal, Jesus legal, Socrates legal and that is the kaleidoscopic nature of what we live through here and in other places because all tyrants learn that it is far better to do this thing through some semblance of legality than to do it without that pretext.