Democracy Dictatorship Quotes

#1. Dictators seem to learn from history much better than democrats

Garry Kasparov

#2. The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness.

Niels Bohr

#3. Anywhere, anytime ordinary people are given the chance to choose, the choice is the same: freedom, not tyranny; democracy, not dictatorship; the rule of law, not the rule of the secret police.

Tony Blair

#4. Democracy in a country where the public is uneducated is no different from having a dictatorship or an elected king.

Zulfu Livaneli

#5. Dictatorship naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme liberty.

John Kennedy Toole

#6. Any comparison between the military dictatorship and democracy can only come from those who does not value the Brazilian democracy.

Dilma Rousseff

#7. The rifle and handgun are 'equalizers'
the weapons of a democracy. Tanks and bombers represent dictatorship.

Edward Abbey

#8. The degree of liberty or tyranny in any government is in large degree a reflection of the relative determination of the subjects to be free and their willingness and ability to resist efforts to enslave them.

Gene Sharp

#9. As much as I say that market economy is a more aggressive, expansile form of command economy, I say now that democracy is a more aggressive, expansile form of dictatorship. The sin of democracy and any types of -cracy is their numbers.

Andreas Laurencius

#10. But Cuba doesn't have a dictatorship it's a revolutionary democracy.

Hugo Chavez

#11. Kenya DOES NOT belong to 2 tribes only. Kenya has 42 tribes. to say that the decision of 2 tribes is the decision of the whole country is fallacy and outright dictatorship and tribalism
Akuku Mach Pep, Democracy on Trial

Akuku Mach Pep

#12. It will be difficult, even painful, but democracy will prevail in Russia. There will be no dictatorship, although relapses into authoritarianism are possible.

Mikhail Gorbachev

#13. Kennedy echoed Stanley Baldwin that a democracy is always two years behind a dictator.

Scott Farris

#14. Any dictatorship would be better than modern democracy. There cannot be so incompetent a dictator, that he would show more stupidity than a majority of the people. Best dictatorship would be one where lots of heads would roll and government would prevent any economical growth.

Pentti Linkola

#15. Devoid of any real liberty or justice, America and her children had fallen prey to what amounted to little more than a thinly veiled dictatorship. She now represented not the proud citadel of freedom, but the failed experiment of democracy.

Eric J. Martindale

#16. Any government, whether it is a democracy, a dictatorship, a communistic or free enterprise bureaucracy, will fall when its hierarchy reaches an intolerable state of maturity.

Laurence J. Peter

#17. The difference between dictatorship and democracy is that in a dictatorship one man can overcome, humiliate and put upon the other. In a democracy, the other can do the same with one.

Frigyes Karinthy

#18. Most of ideologies are not based on the individual - no matter what they say. There are these peoples' democracies, nationalism - they're all dictatorships. And I think any kind of dictatorship is bad for the individual.

Frank Capra

#19. The key of the success of Studio 54 is that it's a dictatorship at the door and a democracy on the dance floor.

Andy Warhol

#20. Propaganda is to a democracy what violence is to a dictatorship.

William Blum

#21. Television has made dictatorship impossible but democracy unbearable.

Shimon Peres

#22. Somehow, people always forget that it's much easier to install a dictator than to remove one

Garry Kasparov

#23. Once the philosophical foundation of democracy has collapsed, the statement that dictatorship is bad is rationally valid only for those who are not its beneficiaries, and there is no theoretical obstacle to the transformation of this statement into its opposite.

Max Horkheimer

#24. Only that Swiss in the heart want still a king or at least a strong Upper House of Parliament. Swiss long themselves for less democracy and more dictatorship.

Peter Bichsel

#25. The era of using people as production tools is coming to an end. Participation is infinitely more complex to practice than conventional corporate unilateralism, just as democracy is much more cumbersome than dictatorship. But there will be few companies that can afford to ignore either of them.

Ricardo Semler

#26. The amount of violations of human rights in a country is always an inverse function of the amount of complaints about human rights violations heard from there. The greater the number of complaints being aired, the better protected are human rights in that country.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan

#27. The forces of moderation and democracy must, and will, prevail against extremism and dictatorship. I will not be intimidated ... Despite threats of death, I will not acquiesce to tyranny, but rather lead the fight against it.

Benazir Bhutto

#28. The tank, the B-52, the fighter-bomber, the state-controlled police and military are the weapons of dictatorship. The rifle is the weapon of democracy. Not for nothing was the revolver called an equalizer.

Edward Abbey

#29. The difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that in a democracy you vote first and take orders later; in a dictatorship you don't have to waste your time voting.

Charles Bukowski

#30. If the test of patriotism comes only by reflexively falling into lockstep behind the leader whenever the flag is waved, then what we have is a formula for dictatorship, not democracy.

Michael Pare

#31. [D]emocracy can itself be as tyrannical as a dictatorship, since it is the extent, not the source, of government power that impinges on freedom.
-William F Buckley

William F. Buckley Jr.

#32. The dictatorship of hate has by now completely vanquished the democracy of pleasure.

Angelos Michalopoulos

#33. Jazz is about freedom within discipline. Usually a dictatorship like in Russia and Germany will prevent jazz from being played because it just seemed to represent freedom, democracy and the United States.

Dave Brubeck

#34. Open avowal of dictatorship is much less dangerous than sham democracy. The first one can fight; sham democracy is insidious.

Wilhelm Reich

#35. For me democracy is the only way of life. The opposite is dictatorship or anarchy.

Elie Wiesel

#36. High school is neither a democracy nor a dictatorship - nor, contrary to popular belief, an anarchic state. High school is a divine-right monarchy. And when the queen goes on vacation, things change.

John Green

#37. A nation can be one or the other, a democracy or an imperialist, but it can't be both. If it sticks to imperialism, it will, like the old Roman Republic, on which so much of our system was modeled, like the old Roman Republic, it will lose its democracy to a domestic dictatorship.

Chalmers Johnson

#38. Rather than a democracy, we increasingly have an elective dictatorship. People are merely permitted to choose who will violate the laws and the Constitution.

James Bovard

#39. democracy that cannot control its own population may be worse for human rights than a dictatorship that can.

Robert D. Kaplan

#40. A democracy is a compromise by its nature. It's not a dictatorship.

Jamie Dimon

#41. Of course I wrote most of the Constitution myself. I remember hesitating for a long time over the US presidential system. But it wouldn't have done - we were too trained in English democracy to sit down under a dictatorship which is what the American system really is.

Eamon De Valera

#42. You don't get the fox to be in charge of the chicken coop. You don't give the outgoing regime - which has been practicing dictatorship, is an authoritarian system, it's a bunch of military people - the task of changing Egypt into a second republic, a new Egypt with democracy, freedom, rights, etc.

Mohamed ElBaradei

#43. The dictatorship is shut up, democracy is always concerned.

Woody Allen

#44. Through the ballot, we can defend our democracy from the threat of dictatorship,

Joseph Estrada

#45. The transition from dictatorship to democracy is always very difficult, and if you read a history of any country that went through this, it wasn't easy. And, you know, you don't end dictatorship one day and next day you have fully fledged democracy.

Wael Ghonim

#46. We preach democracy while supporting dictatorships.

James W. Loewen

#47. Democracy is alive, and like any other living thing it either flourishes and grows or withers and dies. There is no in-between. It is freedom and life or dictatorship and death.

Saul Alinsky

#48. It's true that General Musharraf opposes my return, seeing me as a symbol of democracy in the country. He is comfortable with dictatorship. I hope better sense prevails.

Benazir Bhutto

#49. We can hardly pride ourselves on being the world's preeminent democracy, after all, if the large numbers of citizens spend half their waking hours in what amounts, in plain terms, to a dictatorship.

Barbara Ehrenreich

#50. The simple fact is we do not live in a democracy. Certainly not the kind our Founding Fathers intended. We live in a corporate dictatorship represented by, and beholden to, no single human being you can reason with or hold responsible for anything.

Steven Van Zandt

#51. Generalization is flawed thinking only when applied to individuals. It is the most accurate way to describe the mass, the Wad. And yours is a democracy, a dictatorship of the Wad.

Trevanian

#52. You know history better than I do, you've been teaching all your life. Without real opposition you get dictators down the line. Idi, Amin, Mugabe. No democracy without opposition.

Nadine Gordimer

#53. To Westerners, the students at Tiananmen may have given an impression of a solid and energetic consensus against dictatorship and for democracy, but they were an egotistical and fractious lot, riven by disagreements over tactics and money.

Pankaj Mishra

#54. The Germans should be the first to sympathize with us [Egyptians]. They know how difficult it is to build a democracy following a dictatorship, and they were the first to be critical of Morsi's anti-democratic policies.

Mohamed ElBaradei

#55. I grew up in a dictatorship, so I really appreciate democracy. I think democracy isn't just a random thing that's around - a democratic society needs the involvement of everybody.

Paul Van Dyk

#56. I worry about a democracy having nuclear weapons as much as a dictatorship having nuclear weapons.

Mohamed ElBaradei

#57. The only way to save the world is through socialism, but a socialism that exists within a democracy; there's no dictatorship here.

Hugo Chavez

#58. The lesson we are indebted to Egypt for, our future generations learned that in the face of oppression silence is never golden.

Aysha Taryam

#59. It is true you cannot eat freedom and you cannot power machinery with democracy. But then neither can political prisoners turn on the light in the cells of a dictatorship.

Corazon Aquino

#60. Maintain democracy or go to dictatorship: that is what is at stake in these elections.

Mario Vargas-Llosa

#61. You want Change, today we'll show you Change!
Here's your democracy, your human rights, eat it, eat eat eat!

NoViolet Bulawayo

#62. Is it not the excess and greed of this and the neglect of all other things that revolutionizes this constitution too and prepares the way for the necessity of a dictatorship?

Plato

#63. Democracy represents the dictatorship of the exploiting classes.

Che Guevera

#64. Generalized intelligence and mental alertness are the most powerful enemies of dictatorship and at the same time the basic conditions of effective democracy.

Aldous Huxley

#65. Sometimes I think that a parody of democracy could be more dangerous than a blatant dictatorship, because that gives people an opportunity to avoid doing anything about it.

Aung San Suu Kyi

#66. In a democracy, you believe it or not; in a dictatorship, you believe it or else.

Evan Esar