Top 81 Despotic Quotes
#1. At the core of liberalism is the spoiled child - miserable, as all spoiled children are, unsatisfied, demanding, ill-disciplined, despotic and useless. Liberalism is a philosophy of sniveling brats.
P. J. O'Rourke
#2. There is something about men more capable of shaking despotic power than lightening, whirlwind, or earthquake, that is, the threatened indignation of the whole civilized world.
Daniel Webster
#3. The will of the nation is one of those expressions which have been most profusely abused by the wily and the despotic of every age.
Alexis De Tocqueville
#5. It is impossible to grasp the meaning of the idea of sound money if one does not realize that it was devised as an instrument for the protection of civil liberties against despotic inroads on the part of governments.
Ludwig Von Mises
#6. I find life itself provides ample and sufficient tests of my valor and mettle: illness; betrayal; fruitless searches for love; working for the abusive, the insane, and the despotic. All challenges easily as thrilling to me as scrambling over icy rock in a pair of barely adequate boots.
David Rakoff
#7. The days of looking the other way while despotic regimes trample human rights, rob their nations' wealth, and then excuse their failings by feeding their people a steady diet of anti-Western hatred are over.
Dick Cheney
#8. Moral qualities rule the world, but at short distances the senses are despotic.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#9. Wealth held by a class and used ambitiously becomes as despotic as an absolute monarchy, and has in its hands manners, customs, laws, institutions, and governments themselves.
Henry Ward Beecher
#10. All great sages are as despotic as generals, and as ungracious and indelicate as generals, because they are confident of their impunity.
Anton Chekhov
#11. Religion glorifies the dogma of a despotic, mythical God. Atheism ennobles the interests of free and progressive Man. Religion is superstition. Atheism is sanity. Religion is medieval. Atheism is modern.
E. Haldeman-Julius
#12. [T]he opinion which gives to the judges the right to decide what laws are constitutional and what not, not only for themselves, in their, own sphere of action, but for the Legislature and Executive also in their spheres, would make the Judiciary a despotic branch.
Thomas Jefferson
#13. The superior force of despotic regimes is disarmed not through violence but through conversion.
Chris Hedges
#14. The original settlers in Iceland were the nobles of Norway who left their native land to avoid the tyranny of Harold Fairhair, who tried to crush their power so as to make himself a despotic king in the land.
Sabine Baring-Gould
#15. When law becomes despotic, morals are relaxed, and vice versa.
Honore De Balzac
#16. I hold it to be the most monstrous proposition ever uttered within the Senate that conquering a country like Mexico, the President can constitute himself a despotic ruler without the slightest limitation on his power. If all this be true, war is indeed dangerous!
John C. Calhoun
#17. The concentrating of powers in the same hands is precisely the definition of despotic government. It will be no alleviation that these powers will be exercised by a plurality of hands, and not by a single one.
Thomas Jefferson
#18. Whether it comes from a despotic sovereign or an elected president, from a murderous general or a beloved leader, I see power as an inhuman and hateful phenomenon.
Oriana Fallaci
#19. In a free country there is much clamor, with little suffering; in a despotic state there is little complaint, with much grievance.
Lazare Carnot
#20. There are three species of government: republican, monarchical, and despotic.
Charles De Secondat
#21. Yes, marriage is hateful, detestable. A kind of ineffable, sickening disgust seizes my mind when I think of this most despotic, most unrequited fetter which prejudice has forged to confine its energies.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#22. The trial by jury might safely be introduced into a despotic government, if the jury were to exercise no right of judging of the law, or the justice of the law.
Lysander Spooner
#23. Vanity is the most despotic and iniquitous of masters, and I can never be the slave of my own vices.
George Sand
#24. The public is despotic in its temper; it is capable of denying common justice when too strenuously demanded as a right; but quite as frequently it awards more than justice, when the appeal is made, as despots love to have it made, entirely to its generosity.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#25. Virtue is despotic; life, reputation, every earthly good, must be surrendered at her voice. The law may seem hard, but it is the guardian of what it commands; and is the only sure defence of happiness.
Jane Porter
#26. A single legislature, on account of the superabundance of its power, and the uncontrolled rabidity of its execution, becomes as dangerous to the principles of liberty as that of a despotic monarch.
Thomas Paine
#27. The utopian schemes of leveling and a community of goods, are as visionary and impractical as those which vest all property in the crown. These ideas are arbitrary, despotic, and, in our government unconstitutional.
Samuel Adams
#28. Under the all-encompassing aid system, too many places in Africa continue to flounder under inept, corrupt and despotic regimes who spend their time courting and catering to the demands of the army of aid organizations.
Dambisa Moyo
#29. The defence of human liberty against the aggressions of despotic power have been always the most efficient in States where domestic slavery was to prevail.
John C. Calhoun
#30. The Christian religion is a stranger to mere despotic power. The mildness so frequently recommended in the Gospel is incompatible with the despotic rage.
Baron De Montesquieu
#31. Despotic governments can stand 'moral force' till the cows come home; what they fear is physical force.
George Orwell
#32. All power, even the most despotic, rests ultimately on opinion.
David Hume
#33. Therefore God's universal law Gave to the man despotic power Over his female in due awe, Not from that right to part an hour, Smile she or lour.
John Milton
#34. The government of freemen is nobler and implies more virtue than despotic government. Neither is a city to be deemed happy or a legislator to be praised because he trains his citizens to conquer and obtain dominion over their neighbors, for there is great evil in this.
Aristotle.
#35. When the savages of Louisiana wish to have fruit, they cut the tree at the bottom and gather the fruit. That is exactly a despotic government.
Baron De Montesquieu
#36. Modern Western democracies no longer engage in such despotic assaults on freedom, Instead, they deprive people of liberty indirectly, by relieving them of responsibility for their own (allegedly self-injurious) actions and calling the intervention treatment.
Thomas Szasz
#37. The consolidation of the states into one vast empire, sure to be aggressive abroad and despotic at home, will be the certain precursor of ruin which has overwhelmed all that preceded it.
Robert E.Lee
#38. Despotic governments do not recognize the precious human component of the state, seeing its citizens only as a faceless, mindless
and helpless
mass to be manipulated at will. It is as though people were incidental to a nation rather than its very life-blood.
Aung San Suu Kyi
#39. How can this full, perfect, just and supreme voice of the people, embodied in the Constitution, be brought to bear, habitually and steadily, in counteracting the fatal tendency of the government to the absolute and despotic control of the numerical majority?
John C. Calhoun
#40. A guardian is broad-minded and understanding. A guard, on the other hand, is a vigilante, narrow-minded and most of the time despotic.
Carlos Castaneda
#41. She developed a kind of disdain for her only sibling usually reserved for despotic political regimes and perpetrators of genocide.
Elisa Albert
#42. The control of information is something the elite always does, particularly in a despotic form of government. Information, knowledge, is power. If you can control information, you can control people.
Tom Clancy
#43. 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
#44. No one had ever accused Koko of being naughty. Perverse, perhaps, or arrogant, or despotic. But naughtiness was beneath his dignity.
Lilian Jackson Braun
#45. But in all despotic governments, though a particular prince may favour arts and letter, there is a natural degeneracy of mankind.
Joseph Addison
#46. The money power preys on the nation in times of peace, and conspires against it in times of adversity. It is more despotic than monarchy, more insolent than autocracy, more selfish than bureaucracy. It denounces, as public enemies, all who question its methods or throw light upon its crimes.
Abraham Lincoln
#47. Much violence against women originates in emotional territory that they already command. By midlife and early old age, as the hormones of both genders change, women are in total, despotic control of their marriages.
Camille Paglia
#48. We invaded Iraq to change a totalitarian, despotic regime, and we have been successful there.
Judd Gregg
#49. In a despotic government, the only principle by which the tyrant who is to move the whole machine means to regulate and manage the people is fear, by the servile dread of his power. But a free government, which of all others is far the most preferable, cannot be supported without virtue.
Samuel Williams
#50. Most kings and priests have been despotic, and all religions have been riddled with superstition.
Aldous Huxley
#51. [Jehovah is] certainly the most jealous, the most vain, the most ferocious, the most unjust, the most bloodthirsty, the most despotic, and the most hostile to human dignity and liberty.
Mikhail Bakunin
#52. Public Opinion, this invisible, intangible, omnipresent, despotic tyrant; this thousand-headed Hydra - the more dangerous for being composed of individual mediocrities ...
H. P. Blavatsky
#53. An enlightened zeal for the energy and efficiency of government will be stigmatized, as the offspring of a temper fond of despotic power, and hostile to the principles of liberty.
Alexander Hamilton
#54. You arrogant, selfish, egotistical, medieval, despotic, swollen-headed, dumb, idiot penis owner!
Christine Warren
#55. The political criminal is the victim of an attempt of a more or less despotic government to preserve its own stability. He is not necessarily guilty of an unsocial offense; he simply tries to overturn a certain political order which may itself be anti-social.
Emma Goldman
#56. In the sacred precinct of that dwelling where the despotic woman wields the sceptre of fierce neatness, one treads as if he carried his life in his hands.
Henry Ward Beecher
#57. Interestingly, Marxism, Communism and its derivative, Socialism, when seen years later in practice, are nothing but state-capitalism and rule by a privileged minority, exercising despotic and total control over a majority which is left with virtually no property or legal rights.
Andrew Carrington Hitchcock
#58. Even the most despotic government cannot stand except for the consent of the governed ... Immediately the subject ceases to fear the despotic force, his power is gone.
Mahatma Gandhi
#59. What led to September 11 is that most decision makers in the White House thought like you. They supported despotic regimes in the Middle East to multiply the profits of oil and arms companies, and armed violence escalated and reached our shores.
Alaa Al Aswany
#60. Power is always right, weakness always wrong. Power is always insolent and despotic.
Noah Webster
#61. Theologians are all alike, of whatever religion or country they may be; their aim is always to wield despotic authority over men's consciences; they therefore persecute all of us who have the temerity to tell the truth.
Frederick The Great
#62. In republican governments, men are all equal; equal they are also in despotic governments: in the former, because they are everything; in the latter, because they are nothing.
Baron De Montesquieu
#63. Despotic power is always accompanied by corruption of morality.
Lord Acton
#64. His chest heaved once, as if his large heart, weary of despotic constriction, had expanded, despite the will, and made a vigorous bound for the attainment of liberty.
Charlotte Bronte
#65. And I hereby distinctly and emphatically declare that I consider myself, and earnestly desire to be considered by others, as utterly divested, now and during the rest of my life, of any such rights, the barbarous relics of a feudal, despotic system.
Robert Dale Owen
#66. The past is democratic, because it is a people. The future is despotic, because it is a caprice. Every man is alone in his prediction, just as each man is alone in a dream.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#67. The most popular man under a democracy is not the most democratic man, but the most despotic man. The common folk delight in the exactions of such a man. They like him to boss them. Their natural gait is the goose step.
H.L. Mencken
#68. I wanted to write in Kitchenese, the secret language of cooks, instantly recognizable to anyone who has ever dunked french fries for a summer job or suffered under the despotic rule of a tyrannical chef or boobish owner.
Anthony Bourdain
#69. Slave power crushes freedom of speech and of opinion. Slave power degrades labor. Slave power is arrogant, is jealous and intrusive, is cruel, is despotic, not only over the slave but over the community, the state.
Elizabeth Van Lew
#70. It is on opinion only that government is founded; and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments, as well as to the most free and most popular.
David Hume
#71. When the savages of Louisiana are desirous of fruit, they cut the tree to the root and gather the fruit. This is an emblem of despotic government.
Montesquieu
#72. The manager swiftly overtook him, sliding effortlessly past the skinny Englishman, with the practiced ease of someone used to slinking around ailing, despotic monarchs.
Tom Vater
#73. The Palestinians are a despotic, undemocratic grouping which promotes a religious war against Israel, a democracy, through terror.
Melanie Phillips
#74. I could better eat with one who did not respect the truth or the laws, than with a sloven and unpresentable person. Moral qualities rule the world, but at shorter distances, the senses are despotic.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#75. Human rights can only be assured among a virtuous people. The general government ... can never be in danger of degenerating into a monarchy, an oligarchy, an aristocracy, or any despotic or oppresive form so long as there is any virtue in the body of the people.
George Washington
#76. I was attracted to their guns, because the guns seemed honest. The guns seemed to address this country, which invented the streets that secured them with despotic police, in its primary language - violence.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#77. Unless the whole structure of the government is changed from a government by States to something like a despotic central government, with power to control even the municipal regulations of States, and to make them conform to its own despotic will.
Frederick Douglass
#78. Despotic rules are attempting to deprive women of their rights.
Yousef Saanei
#79. Recent action in Syria and Palestine also tell us that the awakening voices of democracy in those regions are occurring, and that those in that region are able to pursue it without being stifled by terrorists that are despotic.
Judd Gregg
#80. The glory of God is not that of a despotic tyrant, but the splendour of love before which we fall not in abject terror but lost in wonder, love and praise.
William Barclay
#81. The freedom of the press is one of the great bulwarks of liberty, and can never be restrained but by despotic governments.
George Mason
