Quotes and Sayings About Tyrants
-
Words are freeborn, and not the vassals of the gruff tyrants of prose to do their bidding only. They have the same right to dance and sing as the dewdrops have to sparkle and the stars to shine.
-- Abraham ColesSource : Abraham Coles (1885). “The Life and Teachings of Our Lord in Verse: Being a Complete Harmonized Exposition of the Four Gospels, with Original Notes Textual Index, Etc. Two Volumes in One, Vol. 1 -- The Evangel (second Edition), Vol. 2 -- The Light of the World”
-
A test of a people is how it behaves toward the old. It is easy to love children. Even tyrants and dictators make a point of being fond of children. But the affection and care for the old, the incurable, the helpless are the true gold mines of a culture.
-- Abraham Joshua HeschelSource : Abraham Joshua Heschel (1955). “Insecurity of Freedom”, p.72, Macmillan
-
Familiarize yourselves with the chains of bondage and you prepare your own limbs to wear them. Accustomed to trample on the rights of others, you have lost the genius of your own independence and become the fit subjects of the first cunning tyrant who rises among you.
-- Abraham Lincoln -
And then, the negro being doomed, and damned, and forgotten, to everlasting bondage, is the white man quite certain that the tyrant demon will not turn upon him too?
-- Abraham Lincoln -
-
The victor will never be asked if he told the truth.
-- Adolf Hitler -
An evil exists that threatens every man, woman, and child of this great nation. We must take steps to ensure our domestic security and protect our homeland.
-- Adolf Hitler -
We stand for the maintenance of private property... We shall protect free enterprise as the most expedient, or rather the sole possible economic order.
-- Adolf Hitler -
Neither a life of anarchy nor one beneath a despot should you praise; to all that lies in the middle a god has given excellence.
-- Aeschylus -
-
The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants.
-- Albert CamusSource : Albert Camus (2012). “Resistance, Rebellion, and Death: Essays”, p.101, Vintage
-
Force always attracts men of low morality, and I believe it to be an invariable rule that tyrants of genius are succeeded by scoundrels.
-- Albert Einstein -
Modern man no longer regards Nature as in any sense divine and feels perfectly free to behave toward her as an overweening conqueror and tyrant.
-- Aldous Huxley -
-
The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.
-- Aldous HuxleySource : 1937 The Olive Tree.
-
A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant, at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient bureaucracy.
-- Aldous Huxley -
A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.
-- Aldous Huxley -
Of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people, commencing demagogues and ending tyrants.
-- Alexander Hamilton -
-
...great Ambition, unchecked by principle, or the love of Glory, is an unruly Tyrant...
-- Alexander Hamilton -
In adamantine chains shall Death be bound, And Hell's grim tyrant feel th' eternal wound.
-- Alexander Pope -
Still when the lust of tyrant power succeeds, some Athens perishes, or some Tully bleeds.
-- Alexander Pope -
In this, our age of infamy Man's choice is but to be A tyrant, traitor, prisoner: No other choice has he.
-- Alexander Pushkin -
-
Michael Moore: a man who never without an excuse for keeping murdering tyrants in power. But now he's supporting the man who bombed Milosevic into submission? How about an explanation, Mr Moore?
-- Andrew Sullivan -
Eripuit coelo fulmen sceptrumque tyrannis. He snatched the lightning from the sky and the sceptre from tyrants.
-- Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, Baron de Laune -
Both oligarch and tyrant mistrust the people, and therefore deprive them of their arms.
-- Aristotle -
It is also in the interests of the tyrant to make his subjects poor... the people are so occupied with their daily tasks that they have no time for plotting.
-- Aristotle -
-
A king ruleth as he ought, a tyrant as he lists, a king to the profit of all, a tyrant only to please a few.
-- Aristotle -
No tyrant need fear till men begin to feel confident in each other.
-- Aristotle -
All three states - the Lacedaemonian, the Cretan, and the Carthaginian - nearly resemble one another, and are very different from any others. Many of the Carthaginian institutions are excellent. The superiority of their constitution is proved by the fact that the common people remains loyal to the constitution; the Carthaginians have never had any rebellion worth speaking of, and have never been under the rule of a tyrant.
-- Aristotle -
Republics end through luxury; monarchies through poverty.
-- Baron de Montesquieu -
-
There is no crueler tyranny than that which is perpetuated under the shield of law and in the name of justice.
-- Baron de Montesquieu -
The president, who finds so much to complain about in other areas of the world, apparently saw nothing wrong in recognizing a Communist regime that has killed more people in its short history of control over the teeming millions of that great country than any other collection of dictators or tyrants in the history of the world.
-- Barry Goldwater