Tyranny Quotes

Democracy, which began by liberating man politically, has developed a dangerous tendency to enslave him through the tyranny of majorities and the deadly power of their opinion.

We have to call it "freedom": who'd want to die for "a lesser tyranny"

Despotism can do without faith but freedom cannot.

Power, when invested in the hands of knaves or fools, generally is the source of tyranny.

Tyranny knows no restraint of appetite.

If everyone understood evolution, then the tyranny of religious memes would be weakened, and we little humans might find a better way to live in this pointless universe.

It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.

The heights of popularity and patriotism are still the beaten road to power and tyranny.

Power-lust is a weed that grows only in the vacant lots of an abandoned mind.

This work was strictly voluntary, but any animal who absented himself from it would have his rations reduced by half.

It is a besetting vice of democracies to substitute public opinion for law. This is the usual form in which masses of men exhibit their tyranny.

To give pain is the tyranny; to make happy, the true empire of beauty.

I preferred measuring deer tracks to tape - that I liked the wild liberty of the Red men better then the tyranny of my brothers.

Tyranny and anarchy are alike incompatible with freedom, security, and the enjoyment of opportunity.

[The] discretion of the judge is the first engine of tyranny . . .

The framers gave us the Second Amendment not so we could go deer or duck hunting but to give us a modicum of protection against congressional tyranny.

All good government must begin at home. It is useless to make good laws for bad people; what is wanted is this, to subdue the tyranny of the human heart.

All government, all exercise of power, no matter in what form, which is not based in love and directed by knowledge, is a tyranny.

Poverty can lead to tyranny. Capitolism creates freedom. If the poor had a better image of the rich they could be just like them.

To demand that another love what one loves is tyranny enough, but to demand that another hate what one hates, is even worse.

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.

Apathy is the slow poison coursing through the body politic that paves the way to tyranny.

The tyranny imposed on the soul by anger, or fear, or lust, or pain, or envy, or desire, I generally call 'injustice.'

Man is not, by nature, deserving of all that he wants. When we think that we are automatically entitled to something, that is when we start walking all over others to get it.

Our culture is just a series of checks and balances. The whole idea that we're in a battle between tyranny and freedom - it's a series of pendulum swings.

And of all plagues with which mankind are curst, Ecclesiastic tyranny's the worst.

The most effective means of preventing tyranny is to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large, and more especially to give them knowledge of those facts.

Tyranny, like fog in the well known poem, often creeps in silently 'on little cat feet.'

The thin and precarious crust of decency is all that separates any civilization, however impressive, from the hell of anarchy or systematic tyranny which lie in wait beneath the surface .

Anarchy is the sure consequence of tyranny; for no power that is not limited by laws can ever be protected by them.

Tyranny is the political corollary of socialism, as representative government is the political corollary of the market economy.

A police state finds that it cannot command the grain to grow.

Democracy is better than tyranny.

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

Tyranny is for the worst of treasons.

A dogmatic belief in objective value is necessary to the very idea of a rule which is not tyranny or an obedience which is not slavery.

No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets.

A caged canary is secure; but it is not free. It is easier for free men to resist terrorism from afar than tyranny from within.

[The Bill of Rights is] designed to protect individuals and minorities against the tyranny of the majority, but it's also designed to protect the people against bureaucracy, against the government.

The fact is that certain themes cannot be celebrated in words, and tyranny is one of them. No one ever wrote a good book in praise of the Inquisition.

The tyrant grinds down his slaves and they don't turn against him, they crush those beneath them.

For somehow this is tyranny's disease, to trust no friends.

Tyrants have not yet discovered any chains that can fetter the mind.

I'm willing to be regarded as a tyrant to keep my vision intact.

What will people say-in these words lies the tyranny of the world, the whole destruction of our natural disposition, the oblique vision of our minds. These four words hold sway everywhere.

The brutal regime of the dictator fell, the regime that ruled Iraq for decades, the decades of darkness. The decades that were of tyranny.

Liberty, when it degrades into licentiousness, begets confusion, and frequently ends in tyranny or some woeful confusion.

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.

If we look at the black record of mass murder, exploitation, and tyranny levied on society by governments over the ages, we need not be loath to abandon the Leviathan State and . . . try freedom.

Where the hand of tyranny is long we do not see the lips of men open with laughter.