Top 76 Despot Quotes
#1. I would sooner damn myself to Hell than be forced to serve the insufferable despot that the Bible portrayed God to be. In
Aron Ra
#2. I don't give a damn if you like Blackbeard. I don't care if you think he is an absolute despot. Do you believe me? If you do, I've done my work.
Ray Stevenson
#3. There are three kinds of despots. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the body. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the soul. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the soul and body alike. The first is called the Prince. The second is called the Pope. The third is called the People.
Oscar Wilde
#4. I wish I was a despot that I might save the noble, the beautiful trees that are daily falling sacrifice to the cupidity of their owners, or the necessity of the poor. The unnecessary felling of a tree, perhaps the growth of centuries, seems to me a crime little short of murder.
Thomas Jefferson
#5. All ideas advanced to deal with the Florentine noise problem, the Florentine traffic problem, are Utopian, and nobody believes in them, just as nobody believed in Machiavelli's Prince, a Utopian image of the ideally self-interested despot.
Mary McCarthy
#7. If we all had names to suit us, you'd be called Thorn in My Backside. Or Plague of the Gods."I prickled at his scathing tone. "And you'd be Miserable Blockhead.""Is that the best you can do?""Give me time. I'm half frozen." "Perhaps your name should be Icy Tyrant. No, wait. Frigid Despot.
Elly Blake
#8. The mass of mankind, Burke implies, reason hardly at all, in the higher sense, nor ever can: deprived of folk-wisdom and folk-law, which are prejudice and prescription, they can do no more than cheer the demagogue, enrich the charlatan, and submit to the despot.
Russell Kirk
#9. That woman, as nature has created her and as man is at present educating her, is his enemy. She can only be his slave or his despot, but never his companion. This she can become only when she has the same rights as he, and is his equal in education and wor.
Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch
#10. A country governed by a despot is an inverted cone.
Samuel Johnson
#11. Those who disagree with the dictator's plan have no other means to carry on than to defeat the despot by force of arms.
Ludwig Von Mises
#12. Despotism is unjust to everybody, including the despot, who was probably made for better things.
Oscar Wilde
#14. Mugabe's become a disgrace to Africa. And I must say this because I am an African and a lot of us looked up to him back in the 1980s when he was the liberation hero. But he's now turned himself into a murderous despot.
George Ayittey
#15. If Despotism failed only for want of a capable benevolent despot, what chance has Democracy, which requires a whole population of capable voters.
George Bernard Shaw
#16. 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
#17. The great conductor is always a despot by temperament and intractable in his ways ... The artist is obliged to keep his laughter and tears to himself. If they want to emerge, in spite of himself, then he must hide them or unleash them in someone else.
Nadia Boulanger
#18. Love sometimes elevates, creates new qualities, suspends the working of evil inclinations; but only for a day. Love, then, is an Oriental despot, whose glance lifts a slave from the dust, and then consigns him to it again.
Sophie Swetchine
#19. If it's a despot you would dethrone, see first that his throne erected within you is destroyed.
Khalil Gibran
#20. Every State is a despotism, be the despot one or many.
Max Stirner
#21. A hurt body and mind aren't just like a dictatorship; they are a dictatorship. There is no tyrant as merciless as pain, no despot so cruel as confusion.
Stephen King
#22. 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
#23. We always make the mistake in the United States of America in Democratic or Republican administrations alike is we tend to embrace the despot that's least troublesome to us. That should not be the way we view things.
Anthony Weiner
#24. A nation ignorant of the equal benefits of liberty and law, must be awed by the flashes of arbitrary power: the cruelty of a despot will assume the character of justice; his profusion, of liberality; his obstinacy, of firmness.
Edward Gibbon
#25. Sin is an exacting despot who can be vanquished by no created power, but by the sovereign power of Jesus Christ alone.
Martin Luther
#26. I think it's essential for comic writers to have a hate figure, a despot, a regime to react against, and I think Thatcher was perfect for me, I loathed everything she stood for.
Sue Townsend
#27. The single despot stands out in the face of all men, and says: I am the State: My will is law: I am your master: I take the responsibility of my acts: The only arbiter I acknowledge is the sword: If any one denies my right, let him try conclusions with me.
Lysander Spooner
#28. No arrogant man has ever touched the human heart, no despot ever commanded respect.
Andy Paula
#29. A man who's active and incisive can yet keep nail-care much in mind: why fight what's known to be decisive? custom is despot of mankind.
Alexander Pushkin
#31. The possession of unlimited power will make a despot of almost any man. There is a possible Nero in the gentlest human creature that walks.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
#32. The Despot is Master only as long as he is the strongest, and as soon as he can be driven out he cannot protest against violence. The uprising that ends by strangling or dethroning a Sultan is as Lawful an act as those by which he disposed, the day before, of the lives and goods of his Subjects.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#33. Marius saw in Bonaparte the dazzling spectre which will always rise upon the frontier, and which will guard the future. Despot but dictator; a despot resulting from a republic and summing up a revolution. Napoleon became for him the man-people as Jesus Christ is the man-God.
Victor Hugo
#34. Sometimes I fantasize about the US head of state as a super-lazy, super-moral libertarian despot and think, "That would certainly make everything easier," even though I can't think of one person who'd qualify, except maybe Willie Nelson.
Chuck Klosterman
#35. You know, there's more to being an evil despot then getting cake whenever you want it."
"If that's what you think, then you're DOING IT WRONG!
Phil Foglio
#36. Be assured, fellow citizens, that in a democracy it is the laws that guard the person of the citizen and the constitution of the state, whereas the despot and the oligarch find their protection in suspicion and in armed guards.
Aeschines
#37. In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own.
Thomas Jefferson
#38. Fashion, n. A despot whom the wise ridicule and obey.
Ambrose Bierce
#40. If men use their liberty in such a way as to surrender their liberty, are they thereafter any the less slaves? If people by a plebiscite elect a man despot over them, do they remain free because the despotism was of their own making?
Herbert Spencer
#41. Fear is a tyrant and a despot, more terrible than the rack, more potent than the snake.
Edgar Wallace
#42. A free and open Internet is a despot's worst enemy.
Jay Samit
#43. Custom governs the world; it is the tyrant of our feelings and our manners and rules the world with the hand of a despot.
Bill Vaughan
#45. Peace /n/: A rare state which has only existed when a despot has been fearsome or strong enough to impose it. The image of your head on the end of a stick is a strong incentive toward 'visualizing world peace'.
Boyd Rice
#46. When asked how much time she invested in taking care of her body, Edith Enders, married to an abusive husband, scrawled, "not as much as I would were I a free citizen or as I did before I was in bondage to a despot.
Kathy Peiss
#47. If a despot like Adolf Hitler can think of 1000-year reign, why can't you think of a goal that is gonna last 100 years after you have gone?
Peter J. Daniels
#48. But the friendship of a despot is ever a dangerous honour.
Kakuzo Okakura
#49. Sanctions make a substantial contribution to power based on privation, and they have never hurt a single despot in the whole history of their use.
Roger Scruton
#50. We Stoics are not subjects of a despot: each of us lays claim to his own freedom.
Seneca.
#51. Our nation and those of the developed world must offer our own resistance to despot leaders who seek to commit murder on the basis of religion or race.
Tim Bishop
#52. No tyrant, however evil, has yet lacked ready hands to execute his most abominable will. To read how eagerly men have rushed to serve the despot is the bitterest, the saddest matter of history; it is the saddest sight in our own day.
Richard Jefferies
#53. Absolute power turns its possessors not into a God but an anti-God. For God turned clay into men, while the absolute despot turns men into clay.
Eric Hoffer
#54. Men are still men. The despot's wickedness Comes of ill teaching, and of power's excess,
Comes of the purple he from childhood wears, Slaves would be tyrants if the chance were theirs.
Victor Hugo
#55. The greatest slave is not he who is ruled by a despot, great though that evil be, but he who is in the thrall of his own moral ignorance, selfishness, and vice.
Samuel Smiles
#56. Nothing is more durable than the dynasty of Doubt; for he reigns in the hearts of all his people, but gives satisfaction to none of them, and yet he is the only despot who can never die, while any of his subjects live.
Charles Caleb Colton
#57. I should favour anything that would increase the present enormous authority of women and their creative action in their own homes. The average woman ... is a despot; the average man is a serf.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#58. Power is the test. Some, once they have it, are content to buy the show of liking, and punish those who withhold it; then you have a despot. But some keep a true eye for how they seem to others, and care about it, which holds them back from much mischief.
Mary Renault
#59. Egotism erects its center in itself; love places it out of itself in the axis of the universal whole. Love aims at unity, egotismat solitude. Love is the citizen ruler of a flourishing republic, egotism is a despot in a devastated creation.
August Wilhelm Von Schlegel
#60. WILL ALIGNMENT
Despot's ultimate goal, using terror as his tool in trade = Corporal punishment in schools
Kamil Ali
Kamil Ali
#61. I don't need immortality. The fear of death keeps a girl sharp. It helps us remember that what we do here, now, matters. What good is immortality, if you're just a dirty little despot in some shitty corner of the world?
C.M. Hayden
#62. Surely the fates are forever kind, though Nature's laws are more immutable than any despot's, yet to man's daily life they rarelyseem rigid, but permit him to relax with license in summer weather. He is not harshly reminded of the things he may not do.
Henry David Thoreau
#63. A despot doesn't fear eloquent writers preaching freedom-he fears a drunken poet may crack a joke that will take hold.
E.B. White
#64. Never may a man prone to believe scandal be a despot or a popular leader! Under his guidance, democracy itself will be despotism.
Apollonius Of Tyana
#65. Woman, as Nature has created her and as she is currently reared by man, is his enemy and can only be his slave or his despot, but never his companion. She will be able to become his companion only when she has the same rights as he, when she is his equal in education and work.
Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch
#67. Man, who wert once a despot and a slave, A dupe and a deceiver! a decay, A traveller from the cradle to the grave Through the dim night of this immortal day.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#68. No despot ever flung forth his legions to die in foreign conquest, no privilege-ruled nation ever erupted across its borders, to lock in death embrace with another, but behind them loomed the driving power of a population too large for its boundaries and its natural resources.
Margaret Sanger
#69. Historically speaking, the Christian religion is nothing but a Jewish sect ... After the destruction of Judaism, the extinction of Christian slave morals must follow logically ... Ah, the God of the deserts, that crazed, stupid, vengeful Asiatic despot with his power to make laws!
Adolf Hitler
#70. At a distance, we cannot conceive of the authority of a despot who knows all his subjects on sight.
Stendhal
#71. Idealism is the despot of thought, just as politics is the despot of will.
Mikhail Bakunin
#72. All social relations exist and grow in the human mind. That one despot can rule over a million other men rests absolutely on their state of mind. They believe that he does; let them change their minds, and he does not.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#73. If you think of yourselves as helpless and ineffectual, it is certain that you will create a despotic government to be your master. The wise despot, therefore, maintains among his subjects a popular sense that they are helpless and ineffectual.
Frank Herbert
#74. I do not know that the Chinese system is any worse; there is a limit to the evil one despot alone can do, and if he is truly vicious he can be overthrown; a hundred corrupt members of Parliament may together do as much injustice or more, and be the less easy to uproot.
Naomi Novik
#75. Prig and philistine, Ph.D. and C.P.A., despot of English 218c and big shot of the Kiwanis Club-how much, at bottom, they both hate Art, and how hard it is to know which of them hates it the more.
Louis Kronenberger
#76. Absolute power corrupts even when exercised for humane purposes. The benevolent despot who sees himself as a shepherd of the people still demands from others the submissiveness of sheep. The taint inherent in absolute power is not its inhumanity but its anti-humanity.
Eric Hoffer
