Top 100 Quotes About Tyranny
#1. Every manmade disaster begins when one man thinks for another. However benevolent they begin, the ultimate outcome is tyranny.
John Kramer
#2. Mystery and terror are the bulwarks of tyranny.
Barry Hughart
#3. Fragile as reason is and limited as law is as the institutionalised medium of reason, that's all we have between us and the tyranny of mere will and the cruelty of unbridled, undisciplined feelings.
Felix Frankfurter
#4. In America, it is indispensable that every well wisher of true liberty should understand that acts of tyranny can only proceed from the publick. The publick, then, is to be watched, in this country, as, in other countries kings and aristocrats are to be watched.
James F. Cooper
#5. I have no desire to go in for tyranny or to play the part of King Charles. I hate tyranny in any field of human activity.
Charles Edison
#6. The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny.
Aesop
#7. Most change initiatives either fail or fall far short of original (perhaps unrealistic) expectations. More often than not, resistance is cultural in nature, the result of what James O'Toole so aptly characterizes as "the ideology of comfort and the tyranny of custom."
John Daly
#8. I personally call the type of government which can be removed without violence 'democracy,' and the other, 'tyranny.'.
Karl Popper
#9. I'm just fascinated by the past. You know, both by the possibilities it holds and by the complete tyranny of it, the way it sort of keeps you in this stranglehold and makes you want things that you no longer have and you can never get back.
Samantha Harvey
#10. The Society which seeks to eliminate the very possibility of causing offence is already halfway down the road to tyranny.
Simon Young
#11. That one special thing that you always wanted to accomplish never gets done because you lived each day under the tyranny of the urgent.
Paul David Tripp
#12. What is our policy? ... to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime.
Winston Churchill
#13. Your empire is now like a tyranny: it may have been wrong to take it; it is certainly dangerous to let it go.
Pericles
#14. Time, she felt, made quite enough claims on us, without our conniving in its relentless tyranny.
Alexander McCall Smith
#15. We pray against the domestic enemies of the Constitution, against this demon of tyranny who is using the White House occupant. That demonic spirit is oppressing us.
Gordon Klingenschmitt
#16. I've always considered the government taking one out of every two dollars I earn absolute tyranny.
Steven Van Zandt
#17. Corruption is just another form of tyranny.
Joe Biden
#18. Human rights are particularly cherished by the West, which has never acknowledged economic rights. Human rights mean freedom from politcal oppression, tyranny and abuse, while economic oppression, tyranny and abuse are built into the very structures of globalization.
Jeremy Seabrook
#19. They were taught about democracy in London, not about tyranny in Cairo.
Ken Follett
#20. My films can be considered political action against the tyranny of good taste.
John Waters
#21. The willing sacrifice of the innocents is the most powerful retort to insolent tyranny that has yet to be conceived by God or man.
Mahatma Gandhi
#22. Tyranny is the exercise of some power over a man, which is not warranted by law, or necessary for the public safety. A people can never be deprived of their liberties, while they retain in their own hands, a power sufficient to any other power in the state.
Noah Webster
#23. Tyranny is always better organized than freedom.
Charles Peguy
#24. 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
#27. William: "I'm sure we can all pull together, sir."
Vetinari: "Oh, I do hope not. Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny. Free men pull in all kinds of directions.
Terry Pratchett
#28. Tyranny has perhaps oftener grown out of the assumptions of power, called for, on pressing exigencies, by a defective constitution, than out of the full exercise of the largest constitutional authorities.
Alexander Hamilton
#29. Virtually every literary piece written about Adolf Hitler in more than half a century since 1945 has been based on antipathy.
-- Hitler: Beyond Evil and Tyranny, p. 11
Russel H.S. Stolfi
#30. The white man say we're fighting for freedom from totalitarianism, terrorism and tyranny, but nobody know what he mean. I
Marlon James
#31. But as fast as geography is coming under our control, the clock is exerting more and more tyranny over us.
Pico Iyer
#32. The right to vote is a consequence, not a primary cause, of a free social system - and its value depends on the constitutional structure implementing and strictly delimiting the voters' power; unlimited majority rule is an instance of the principle of tyranny.
Ayn Rand
#33. We might not object to the statement that Lear deserved to suffer for his folly, selfishness and tyranny; but to assert that he deserved to suffer what he did suffer is to do violence not merely to language but to any healthy moral sense.
Andrew Coyle Bradley
#34. When we are capable of living in the moment free from the tyranny of "shoulds," free from the nagging sensation that this moment isn't right, we will have peaceful hearts.
Joan Z. Borysenko
#35. Sometimes labeling is only useful, like with OCD. Once you're labeled you can be treated. On other occasions labeling leads to tyranny, like with childhood bipolar disorder in the U.S.
Jon Ronson
#36. All education is despotism. It is perhaps impossible for the young to be conducted without introducing in many cases the tyranny implicit in obedience. Go there; do that; read; write; rise; lie down - will perhaps forever be the language addressed to youth by age.
William Godwin
#37. The peculiar circumstances arising out of the fall of the Syracusan tyranny seem to have produced the first practitioners of the art of rhetorical
Aristotle.
#38. Every tyranny imaginable is possible when prefaced by the notion that it is for the well-being of the populace.
Steven Erikson
#39. Tyranny naturally arises out of democracy.
Plato
#41. The world seems to be witnessing a deluge of 'haterisms', and racist propaganda because evil's pain was born to die, and it's time of tyranny is near the end. Don't get caught up by the souls of wickedness; this ain't your fight. ~T.F. Hodge
T.F. Hodge
#42. Tyranny and despotism can be exercised by many, more rigourously, more vigourously, and more severely, than by one.
Andrew Johnson
#43. If you used your head, if you became aware of how love was culturally constructed and began to see your symptoms as purely mental, if you recognized that being "in love" was only an idea, then you could liberate yourself from its tyranny
Jeffrey Eugenides
#44. Many of us came away from our youth thinking that the story of the Revolution was that the Americans were patriots fighting the oppressive British. It was kind of good versus evil, liberty versus tyranny. When you get into it, you find that it was much more complicated.
Nathaniel Philbrick
#45. When justices seize authority from the other branches of the federal government, as well as state and local governments, under the rubric of judicial review, that's tyranny.
Mark Levin
#46. Hitler took the action of pitiless massacre as a last resort in the face of a perceived irreconcilable enemy."
--Hitler: Beyond Evil and Tyranny, p. 39
Russel H.S. Stolfi
#47. There is a golden thread which runs through British history of the individual, standing firm against tyranny and then of the individual participating in his society
Gordon Brown
#48. Of all tyrannies a country can suffer, the worst is the tyranny of the majority.
William Inge
#49. Conservative n.
A person who possesses an underdeveloped taste for tyranny.
liberal n.
A person who believes in liberty, but only for the state.
Leslie Starr O'Hara
#50. Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and opressions of the body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.
Thomas Jefferson
#51. When tyranny becomes law, rebellion is a right.
Simon Bolivar
#52. We don't consider the battle has ended in Afghanistan ... The battle has begun and its fires are picking up. These fires will reach the White House, because it is the center of injustice and tyranny.
Mohammed Omar
#53. The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, selfappointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.
James Madison
#54. Political correctness is just tyranny with manners. I wish for you the courage to be unpopular. Popularity is history's pocket change. Courage is history's true currency.
Charlton Heston
#55. You can pass any law you like to make 'criminals' of those you don't like and then justify it with whatever stupid reasoning that appeals to you. Is that rule of law - or tyranny?
Christina Engela
#56. It is an essential tenet of our whole representative form of government, the idea that there should not be some tyranny which makes it so nobody can even have a chance to vote.
Todd Akin
#57. Memory is a political act. Forgetfulness is the handmaiden of tyranny.
James Carroll
#58. 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
#59. There's relief in not having to be outside. No gardening, no mowing the lawn, no tyranny of long daylight hours to fill with productive activity. We rip through summer, burning the hours and tearing up the land. Then snow comes like a bandage, and winter heals the wounds.
Jerry Dennis
#60. The detention of Japanese Americans during World War II would qualify as an example of majoritarian tyranny and misuse of executive prerogative, driven by fear and racial bias.
Michael Ignatieff
#61. We grow tyrannical fighting tyranny ... The most alarming spectacle today is not the spectacle of the atomic bomb in an unfederated world, it is the spectacle of the Americans beginning to accept the device of loyalty oaths and witch hunts, beginning to call anybody they don't like a Communist.
E.B. White
#62. Public awareness is the equinox of tyranny's rise; once one man learns of another's captivity, he will act to free him. It is the best and most certain part of man's nature.
John Kramer
#63. By its nature, government was either small and personal, something on the level of a town hall meeting, or it was tyranny, with the few ruling the many for their own benefit, no matter how representational that government might be in theory.
William H. Keith Jr.
#64. He had been someone before. That person had been the result of a lifetime of choices, good and bad. And like it or not, he was drawing closer to that identity now. Not the freedom of infinite variety, but the tyranny of a decision made, a path walked, a life lived. What if he didn't like the view
Marcus Sakey
#65. The right constitutions, three in number- kingship, aristocracy, and polity- and the deviations from these, likewise three in number - tyranny from kingship, oligarchy from aristocracy, democracy from polity.
Aristotle.
#66. What I find very interesting about the mutual funds managers is that here are people who are the new masters of the universe. They're managing billions, yet they're subject to this quiet daily tyranny of numbers.
Ron Chernow
#67. The Masons transported their secret wisdom from the Old World to the New World - here, to America - a land they hoped would remain free from religious tyranny.
Dan Brown
#69. He liked to bewilder his pupils, it was a form of tyranny.
John Banville
#70. Ye that dare oppose, not only tyranny, but the tyrant, stand forth!
Thomas Paine
#71. Temperament lies behind mood; behind will, lies the fate of character. Then behind both, the influence of family the tyranny of culture; and finally the power of climate and environment; and we are free, only to the extent we rise above these.
John Burroughs
#72. Any ideal system is its own worst enemy, and as soon as you start to implement these visions of grandeur, they just fall apart and turn into a complete tyranny.
Ben Nicholson
#73. Republican despotism is more fertile in acts of tyranny, because everyone has a hand in it.
Napoleon Bonaparte
#74. Dictatorship naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme liberty.
John Kennedy Toole
#75. 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.
Hugh Reginald Haweis
#76. Once you get a tyranny, you don't easily get rid of it. Much better to remember about eternal vigilance.
Martha Gellhorn
#77. Beauty is a short-lived tyranny
Socrates
#78. The tyranny of maternal duty is not new, but it has become considerably more pronounced with the rise of naturalism, and it has thus far produced neither a matriarchy nor sexual equality, but rather a regression in women's status.
Elisabeth Badinter
#79. The tyranny of the ignoramuses is insurmountable and assured for all time.
Albert Einstein
#80. It is manifest that the only security against the tyranny of the government lies in forcible resistance to the execution of the injustice; because the injustice will certainly be executed, unless it be forcibly resisted.
Lysander Spooner
#82. When you get Richard Dawkins yapping menopausally at some poor hamstrung old archbishop, while we dismantle our environment due to the materialistic, pessimistic principles that the atheistic tyranny of the day is tacitly sponsoring, it is time to look for a new story.
Russell Brand
#83. When economic power became concentrated in a few hands, then political power flowed to those possessors and away from the citizens, ultimately resulting in an oligarchy or tyranny.
John Adams
#84. When we mistake words for reality, we are subject to the tyranny of words.
Taitetsu Unno
#85. For your sake, jewel,
I am glad at soul I have no other child;
For thy escape would teach me tyranny,
To hang clogs on them.
William Shakespeare
#86. In most of history, societies have not been free. It's a very rare society that is free. The default condition of human societies is tyranny.
Michael Novak
#87. Bleed, bleed, poor country!Great tyranny, lay thou thy basis sure;For goodness dares not check thee!His title is affear'd.Shakesp.Macbeth.
Samuel Johnson
#88. 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
#89. The Holy Book calls upon Muslims to resist tyranny. Dictatorships in Pakistan, however long, have, therefore, always collapsed in the face of this spirit.
Benazir Bhutto
#90. The freedom of individuals from compulsion or coercion never was, and is not now, the normal state of human affairs. The normal state for the ordinary person is tyranny, arbitrary control and abuse mainly by their own government.
Walter E. Williams
#91. What Churchill described as the twin marauders of war and tyranny have been almost entirely banished from our continent. Today, hundreds of millions dwell in freedom, from the Baltic to the Adriatic, from the Western Approaches to the Aegean.
David Cameron
#92. The secret of freedom lies in educating people, whereas the secret of tyranny is in keeping them ignorant.
Maximilien De Robespierre
#93. Freed from the pressure of haste, the tyranny of film, and now the restraint of clothes, I found myself looking more closely at what went on around me.
Colin Fletcher
#94. We cannot be happy until we can love ourselves without egotism and our friends without tyranny.
Cyril Connolly
#95. Those who are capable of tyranny are capable of perjury to sustain it.
Lysander Spooner
#96. Aristocracy is kept up by family tyranny and injustice.
Thomas Paine
#97. So long as tyranny exists, in whatever form, man's deepest aspiration must resist it as inevitably as man must breathe.
Emma Goldman
#98. Long time men lay oppress'd with slavish fear Religion's tyranny did domineer ... At length a mighty one of Greece began To assert the natural liberty of man, By senseless terrors and vain fancies let To slavery. Straight the conquered phantoms fled.
Lucretius
#99. Bureaucracy is the rule of nobody and is therefore experienced as tyranny.
Lesslie Newbigin
#100. Mr. Dawson's wife was really so very meek that I fear when the Day of Reckoning comes much of this tyranny will be forgiven him and laid to her account.
Elizabeth Von Arnim
