Tyranny Quotes

Tyrants have always some slight shade of virtue; they support the laws before destroying them

Voltaire

The arbitrary rule of a just and enlightened prince is always bad. His virtues are the most dangerous and the surest form of seduction: they lull a people imperceptibly into the habit of loving, respecting, and serving his successor, whoever that successor may be, no matter how wicked or stupid.

Denis Diderot

Experience hath shown, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.

Thomas Jefferson

This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector.

Plato

The most insupportable of tyrannies is that of inferiors.

Napoleon Bonaparte

Like Cato, give his little senate laws, and sit attentive to his own applause.

Alexander Pope

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

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

Tyranny is yielding to the lust of the governing.

Lord Moulton

Dictators always look good until the last minutes.

Tomas G. Masaryk

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

Rebellion to tyranny is obedience to God.

Thomas Jefferson

One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution in order to establish a dictatorship.

George Orwell

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

If we must have a tyrant, let him at least be a gentleman who has been bred to the business, and let us fall by the axe and not by the butcher's cleaver.

Lord (George Gordon) Byron

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

The tyrant dies and his rule is over, the martyr dies and his rule begins.

Soren Kierkegaard