Top 100 Quotes About Despotism
#1. From being a movement aiming for universal freedom, communism turned into a system of universal despotism. That is the logic of utopia.
John N. Gray
#2. There is this of good in real evils; they deliver us, while they last, from the petty despotism of all that were imaginary.
Charles Caleb Colton
#3. Freedom of conscience entails more dangers than authority and despotism.
Michel Foucault
#4. Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of Liberty.
Thomas Jefferson
#5. I got entangled in my own data, and my conclusion directly contradicts the original idea from which I start. Starting from unlimited freedom, I conclude with unlimited despotism. I will add, however, that apart from my solution of the social formula, there can be no other.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#6. The East knew and to the present day knows only that One is Free; the Greek and the Roman world, that some are free; the German World knows that All are free. The first political form therefore which we observe in History, is Despotism, the second Democracy and Aristocracy, the third, Monarchy.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
#7. It would seem that if despotism were to be established among the democratic nations of our days, it might assume a different character; it would be more extensive and more mild; it would degrade men without tormenting them.
Alexis De Tocqueville
#8. The faith in reason insists that the poverty of democracy offers a greater hope for mankind than the prosperity that attaches itself to aristocracy or despotism.
Bill Vaughan
#10. By 1776 the American revolutionaries had defined "despotism" down to the level of taxing tea and quartering soldiers. At
Steven Pinker
#11. To add to our misery and despair, a bloated aristocracy has sent to China - the greatest and oldest despotism in the world - for a cheap working slave.
Denis Kearney
#12. The struggle for freedom is ultimately not resistance to autocrats or oligarchs but resistance to the despotism of public opinion.
Ludwig Von Mises
#13. If the perpetual oscillation of nations between anarchy and despotism is to be replaced by the steady march of self-restraining freedom, it will be because men will gradually bring themselves to deal with political, as they now deal with scientific questions.
Thomas Huxley
#14. To establish despotism over such a mighty nation must be vain, must be fatal. We shall be forced ultimately to retreat: let us retreat when we can, not when we must.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#15. The more the Party is powerful, the less it will be tolerant: the weaker the opposition, the tighter the despotism.
George Orwell
#16. The first time I read the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, my instinctive reaction was, so what's wrong with THAT? Isn't that the way any master plan should work? Doesn't the public deserve - nay, demand - such despotism?
Anton Szandor LaVey
#17. The revolutionary government is the despotism of liberty against tyranny.
Georg Buchner
#19. The end of despots is always odd?exhilarating to those who suffered their tyrannies, and to those who hold despotism in contempt, and anti-climatic at the same time, the discovery that these tyrants were petty, frightened men after all.
Fouad Ajami
#20. Just as Napoleon was the sole authority in the state, so the husband and father was to exercise authority over his family. Unfortunately the only possible result of despotism on either level is hypocrisy.
J. Christopher Herold
#21. Just as communism always begins with an appeal to "humanity" and equality" and ends with inhuman despotism, so does fascism always begin with an appeal to "nationalism" and "individualism," and ends with a military collectivism far worse than the disease it purports to cure.
Sydney J. Harris
#22. He asks how the evil is to be remedied. I tell him that there seems to be little chance for avoiding the extremes of despotism or anarchy; that the only ground of hope must be the morals of the people, but that these are, I fear, too corrupt.
Gouverneur Morris
#23. By giving the government unlimited powers, the most arbitrary rule can be made legal; and in this way a democracy may set up the most complete despotism imaginable.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#24. Freemasonry teaches not merely temperance, fortitude, prudence, justice, brotherly love, relief, and truth, but liberty, equality, and fraternity, and it denounces ignorance, superstition, bigotry, lust tyranny and despotism.
Theodore Roosevelt
#25. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new guards for their future security -
James Madison
#26. Is not liberty the destruction of all despotism - including, of course, legal despotism?
Frederic Bastiat
#27. Real liberty is neither found in despotism or the extremes of democracy, but in moderate governments.
Alexander Hamilton
#29. War lives on despotism and is not waged with God's love.
Simon Bolivar
#30. Their poverty secured their freedom, since our desires and our possessions are the strongest fetters of despotism.
Edward Gibbon
#31. Government is frequently and aptly classed under two descriptions-a government of force, and a government of laws; the first is the definition of despotism-the last, of liberty.
Alexander Hamilton
#32. 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
#33. Wherever despotism abounds, the sources of public information are the first to be brought under its control.
Calvin Coolidge
#34. She felt in her mind the consciousness that she was entitled to hold a higher rank from her merit, than the arbitrary despotism of religious prejudice permitted her to aspire to.
Walter Scott
#35. Every vice of the Empire has been repeated in the Foundation. Inertia! Our ruling class knows one law; no
change. Despotism! They know one rule; force. Maldistribution! They know one desire; to hold what is
theirs.
Isaac Asimov
#36. The despotism of custom is on the wane. We are not content to know that things are; we ask whether they ought to be.
John Stuart Mill
#37. But I shall spare her. On the ancient monuments of barbarism and despotism I will inscribe great words of justice and mercy
Leo Tolstoy
#38. Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism.
Mary McCarthy
#39. You do not know the unfathomable cowardice of humanity ... servile in the face of force, pitiless in the face of weakness, implacable before blunders, indulgent before crimes ... and patient to the point of martyrdom before all the violences of bold despotism.
Niccolo Machiavelli
#40. Whoever you may be, if your name is Prejudice, Abuse, Ignorance, Oppression, Iniquity, Despotism, Injustice, Fanaticism, Tyranny, beware of the gaping gamin. The little fellow will grow up.
Victor Hugo
#41. Perhaps a revolution can overthrow autocratic despotism and profiteering or power-grabbing oppression, but it can never truly reform a manner of thinking; instead, new prejudices, just like the old ones they replace, will serve as a leash for the great unthinking mass.
Immanuel Kant
#42. People aren't concerned with love; it's too disordered. They prefer despotism. Too much freedom breeds chaos. We can't have that, can we? And how do you make despotism lovable?
Frank Herbert
#43. In general, however, these gentlemen, the reformers, legislators, and politicians, do not desire to exercise an immediate despotism over mankind. No, they are too moderate and too philanthropic for that. They only contend for the despotism, the absolutism, the omnipotence of the law.
Frederic Bastiat
#44. As virtue is necessary in a republic, and honor in a monarchy, fear is what is required in a despotism. As for virtue, it is not at all necessary, and honor would be dangerous there.
Baron De Montesquieu
#45. I earnestly pray that the Omnipotent Being who has not deserted the cause of America in the hour of its extremest hazard, will never yield so fair a heritage of freedom a prey to 'Anarchy' or 'Despotism'.
George Washington
#46. Creativity doesn't flourish in an atmosphere of despotism, coercion and fear.
P.D. James
#47. Resolved ... that it would be a dangerous delusion were a confidence in the men of our choice to silence our fears for the safety of our rights: that confidence is everywhere the parent of despotism - free government is founded in jealousy, and not in confidence;
Thomas Jefferson
#49. When men have become heartily wearied of licentious anarchy, their eagerness has been proportionately great to embrace the opposite extreme of rigorous despotism.
Richard Whately
#50. [the framers of the Constitution] intended our government should be a republic, which differs more widely from a democracy than a democracy from a despotism.
Fisher Ames
#51. Democracy is necessarily despotism, as it establishes an executive power contrary to the general will; all being able to decide against one whose opinion may differ, the will of all is therefore not that of all: which is contradictory and opposite to liberty.
Immanuel Kant
#52. My History of the Jesuits is in four volumes ... This society has been a greater calamity to mankind than the French Revolution, or Napoleon's despotism or ideology. It has obstructed progress of reformation and the improvement of the human mind in society much longer and more fatally.
John Adams
#53. After many unhappy experiments in the direction of an ideal Republic, it was found that what may be described as a Despotism tempered by Dynamite provides, on the whole, the most satisfactory description of ruler - an autocrat who dares not abuse his autocratic power.
W.S. Gilbert
#54. The United States has already passed on as the world's economic leader. Having flouted Thomas Jefferson for too long, America has succumbed to public debt, the 'fore horse for oppression and despotism,' after which 'taxation will follow, and in its train wretchedness and oppression.
Ilana Mercer
#55. Whatever government is not a government of laws, is a despotism, let it be called what it may.
Daniel Webster
#56. It leads to self-fulfilling prophecy and justifications for all manner of obscenities," Leto said. "This ... rhetorical despotism, Lord?" "Yes! It shields evil behind walls of self-righteousness which are proof against all arguments against the evil.
Frank Herbert
#57. When the white man governs himself, that is self-government; but when he governs himself and also governs another man, that is more than self-government - that is despotism.
Abraham Lincoln
#59. It has taken seas of blood to drown the idol of despotism, but the English do not think they bought their laws too dearly.
Voltaire
#60. Despotism accomplishes great things illegally; liberty doesn't even go to the trouble of accomplishing small things legally.
Honore De Balzac
#61. The seeds of freedom ... have now been scattered where despotism and tyranny ranked and ruled, will be watered by the enlivening dews of God's clemency, till the reapers abolitionists shall shout the harvest home.
Henry McNeal Turner
#63. The chains of military despotism, once fastened upon a nation, ages might pass away before they could be shaken off.
William Henry Harrison
#64. Attempts at reform, when they fail, strengthen despotism, as he that struggles tightens those cords he does not succeed in breaking.
Charles Caleb Colton
#65. Force is the vital principle and immediate parent of despotism.
Thomas Jefferson
#66. Small natures require despotism to exercise their sinews, as great souls thirst for equality to give play to their heart.
Honore De Balzac
#67. Beauty is the greatest of human powers. Any power without counterbalance or control becomes autocratic and leads to abuse and to folly. Despotism in a government is insanity; in woman, fantasy.
Honore De Balzac
#68. The moment you introduce a despotism in the world of thought, you succeed in making hypocrites - and you get in such a position that you never know what your neighbor thinks.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#69. The strength and power of despotism consists wholly in the fear of resistance.
Thomas Paine
#70. Have any of our friends got off the Island with their families, or what must they submit to? Despotism or destruction, I fear, is their fate.
William Floyd
#71. It had been supposed, until our time, that despotism was odious, under whatever form it appeared. But it is a discovery of modern days that there are such things as legitimate tyranny and holy injustice, provided they are exercised in the name of the people.
Alexis De Tocqueville
#72. 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
#73. It seems that the inevitable fate of man is never attain complete freedom: princes everywhere tend to despotism and the people to servitude.
Jean-Paul Marat
#74. Bookishness, highest literacy, every technique of cultural propaganda and training not only can accompany bestiality and oppression and despotism but at certain points foster it.
George Steiner
#75. It's political Daddyism and it's as old as demagogues and despotism.
Barry Goldwater
#76. At its best, management theory is part of the democratic promise of America. It aims to replace the despotism of the old bosses with the rule of scientific law. It offers economic power to all who have the talent and energy to attain it.
Matthew Stewart
#77. In matters editorial, I am a believer in totalitarian despotism. Most writers are lazy, difficult, selfish, thoughtless, and unreliable.
John Derbyshire
#78. You who are Prejudice, Abuse, Ignominy, Oppression, Iniquity, Despotism, Injustice, Fanaticism, beware of the wide-eyed urchin. He will grow up.
Victor Hugo
#79. Those who would have us again go to war to save democracy might give a little thought to the likelihood that we would come out of any such struggle a despotism ourselves.
George H. Nash
#81. Socialism easily accepts despotism. It requires the strongest execution of power
power sufficient to interfere with property.
Lord Acton
#82. Man is about the same, in the main, whether with despotism, or whether with freedom.
Walt Whitman
#83. Despotism sits nowhere so secure as under the effigy and ensigns of freedom.
Walter Savage Landor
#84. Enlightened despotism: the only regime that can attract a disabused mind, one incapable of being the accomplice of revolutions since it is not even the accomplice of history.
Emil M. Cioran
#85. If there were only one religion in England there would be danger of despotism, if there were two, they would cut each other's throats, but there are thirty, and they live in peace and happiness.
Voltaire
#86. The Puritans nobly fled from a land of despotism to a land of freedim, where they could not only enjoy their own religion, but could prevent everybody else from enjoyin his.
Artemas Ward
#87. Other offences, even the greatest, are the violation of one law: despotism is the violation of all.
Walter Savage Landor
#88. What a triumph for the advocates of despotism to find that we are incapable of governing ourselves, and that systems founded on the basis of equal liberty are merely ideal and fallacious.
George Washington
#89. Throughout all the pain of enslavement and despotism, of inquisition, forced conversion, and massacre, the Jewish people has carried in its heart the yearning for freedom and has given this craving a folk expression which includes every soul in Israel, every single downtrodden pauperized soul!
Berl Katznelson
#90. Under a Presidential government, a nation has, except at the electing moment, no influence; it has not the ballot-box before it; its virtue is gone, and it must wait till its instant of despotism again returns.
Walter Bagehot
#91. The flames kindled on the Fourth of July, 1776, have spread over too much of the globe to be extinguished by the feeble engines of despotism; on the contrary, they will consume these engines and all who work them.
Thomas Jefferson
#92. Even despotism does not produce its worst effects, so long as individuality exists under it; and whatever crushes individuality is despotism, by whatever name it may be called, and whether it professes to be enforcing the will of God or the injunctions of men.
John Stuart Mill
#93. 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
#94. Why do you demand of me a heroism that perhaps you have not either? It is despotism; it is tyranny. If I ruin anyone, it is only myself ... I am not committing a murder. Why do you look at me like that? Why are you so pale? Rodya, darling, what's the matter?
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#95. The leading princes are the most servile tools of English despotism ... The native princes are the stronghold of the present abominable English system.
Karl Marx
#96. Despotism can only exist in darkness, and there are too many lights now in the political firmament, to permit it to remain anywhere, as it has heretofore done, almost everywhere.
James Madison
#97. Despotism, which we regard with abhorrence, is rather too plausible in decaying feudal, agrarian, pastoral societies. That's why we must expect to have many a defeat before we'll have an ultimate victory in this contest with Communism.
Reinhold Niebuhr
#98. The nation which will not adopt an equilibrium of power must adopt a despotism. There is no other alternative.
John Adams
#99. Each man has an equal social right to multiply his power of motion by all the social factors of civilization. Private property in any of these factors is inconsistent with this fundamental right; it must, obviously, prove a source of economic despotism and industrial slavery.
Daniel De Leon
#100. We are ruled by chance but never have enough patience to accept its despotism.
Edward Dahlberg
