Top 100 Tyrannical Quotes
#1. The most tyrannical of governments are those which make crimes of opinions, for everyone has an inalienable right to his thoughts.
Baruch Spinoza
#2. Living for oneself is a bad thing. The keenest intellectual pleasure comes from being able to return to the self after being absent from it for a spell. But living all the time inside the self, that most tyrannical, demanding and capricious of companions - no, one shouldn't do it.
George Sand
#3. But I would have vengeance to fall on the head, not on the hand; on the tyrannical and oppressive government which designed and directed these premeditated and reiterated insults, not on the tools of office which they employed in the execution of the injuries they designed you.
Walter Scott
#4. A pure democracy is generally a very bad government, It is often the most tyrannical government on earth; for a multitude is often rash, and will not hear reason.
Noah Webster
#5. I will say this much for the nobility: that, tyrannical, murderous, rapacious and morally rotten as they were, they were deeply and enthusiastically religous. Nothing could divert them from the regular and faithful performace of the pieties enjoined b ythe Church
Mark Twain
#6. Always that tyrannical love reaches out. Soft words shrivel me like quicklime. She will not allow me to be cold, hungry. She will insist that I take her own coat, her own food.
Elizabeth Smart
#7. A sense of contentment makes us kindly and benevolent to others; we are not chafed and galled by cares which are tyrannical because original. We are fulfilling our proper destiny, and those around us feel the sunshine of our own hearts.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
#8. There is simply no limit to the tyrannical snobbery that otherwise decent people can descend into when it comes to music.
Stephen Fry
#9. [T]he sovereignty of reason and justice is no more tyrannical than that of desire. They are principles natural to man.
Blaise Pascal
#10. To compel a man to furnish funds for the propagation of ideas he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.
Thomas Jefferson
#11. I think the adverb is a much-maligned part of speech. It's always accused of being oppressive, even tyrannical, when in fact it's so supple and sly.
Eleanor Catton
#12. Intellectual and cultural freedom is the most important single precondition for the breakdown of the kinds of tyrannical and totalitarian systems that periodically threaten us.
James H. Billington
#13. Seek knowledge and teach it to people. Learn dignity and tranquillity, and be humble towards those from whom you learn knowledge and be humble towards those to whom you teach it, and do not be tyrannical scholar otherwise your knowledge cannot be established because of your tyranny.
Umar
#14. The ideal citizen of a tyrannical state is the man or woman who bows in silent obedience in exchange for the status of a well-cared-for herd animal. Thinking people become the tyrants worst enemies.
Claire Wolfe
#15. So long as a man-of-war exists, it must ever remain a picture of much that is tyrannical and repelling in human nature.
Herman Melville
#16. With his shyness and his formality and his tyrannical rages he protected his interior so ferociously that if you loved him, as she did, you learned that you could do him no greater kindness than to respect his privacy.
Jonathan Franzen
#17. If they went hungry, it was not from feeding tyrannical human beings; if they worked hard, at least they worked for themselves. No creature among them went upon two legs. No creature called any other creature 'Master'. All animals were equal. One
George Orwell
#18. There are evils . . . that men inflict upon one another, such as tyrannical domination of some of them over others. - THE GUIDE OF THE PERPLEXED, III, 2
Joel L. Kraemer
#19. If we know one thing from experience it is that oppression does not crush rebellion, no matter how it tries,' I told him. 'It breeds it anew with every tyrannical act.
Isobelle Carmody
#20. I find that the moment I let a woman make friends with me, she becomes jealous, exacting, suspicious, and a damned nuisance. I find that the moment I let myself make friends with a woman, I become selfish and tyrannical.
George Bernard Shaw
#21. Increasingly, I wonder if there are any outrages that would be sufficiently ominous in their effects upon liberty and unequivocal in their moral perversity to awaken the American people to the tyrannical spirit that envelopes the Clinton White House.
Alan Keyes
#22. Democracy is a kingless regime infested by many kings who are sometimes more exclusive, tyrannical and destructive than one, even if he be a tyrant.
Benito Mussolini
#23. I am the Penitent God. And tonight, I have begun my battle. My siege. The hundred-thousand Ink-borne arrows, flying forth from my flaming pen, to assault the walls of tyrannical Cold that hold this man in awful rapture. My campaign for my friend's very soul. My war of Ice, Ink, and Ember.
S.G. Night
#24. Rousseau pounced. Men who dislike cats were tyrannical: They do not like cats because the cat is free and will never consent to become a slave.
Robert Zaretsky
#25. Love is needed to strengthen the weak; love becomes tyrannical when it exacts obedience from an unbeliever.
Mahatma Gandhi
#26. Seek justice from tyrannical governments not with your hat in your hands but with a rifle in your fist.
Emiliano Zapata
#27. When a nation has allowed itself to fall under a tyrannical regime, it cannot be absolved from the faults due to the guilt of that regime.
Winston Churchill
#28. First, I was opposed to gay marriage because it seemed like one more way that gays were wanting to assimilate. When I realized the Christian right was so opposed to it, as well as tyrannical governments in Africa and Russia, I thought, 'It must be a good thing to fight for.'
Edmund White
#29. Politics doesn't align with emotions. An emotional politician is most likely to be a tyrannical leader.
Henry Johnson Jr
#30. Nothing like an arcane literary debate with your tyrannical master while you pass the time leading to your execution.
Elizabeth Wein
#31. The scum of the People are most Tyrannical when they get the Power, and treat their Betters with the greatest Insolence.
Mary Astell
#32. There is a certain justice in criticism. The critic is like a midwife - a tyrannical midwife.
Stephen Spender
#33. The methods by which a trade union can alone act, are necessarily destructive; its organization is necessarily tyrannical.
Henry George
#34. And yet,from the air you think her peaceful and unflustered. On the ground is a place tangled with good intentions and a tyrannical will to live.
Miguel Syjuco
#35. Any law which violates the inalienable rights of man is essentially unjust and tyrannical; it is not a law at all.
Maximilien Robespierre
#36. Government has hardened into a tyrannical monopoly, and the human race in general becomes as absolutely property as beasts in the plow.
John Dickinson
#37. In all tyrannical governments the supreme magistracy, or the right both of making and of enforcing the laws, is vested in one and the same man, or one and the same body of men; and wherever these two powers are united together, there can be no public liberty.
William Blackstone
#38. The object of every free government is the public good, and all lesser interests yield to it. That of every tyrannical government, is the happiness and aggrandizement of one, or a few, and to this the public felicity, and every other interest must submit.
Marcus Junius Brutus The Younger
#39. While America has always been and always will be a safe harbor for those being persecuted by tyrannical governments we must be vigilant to ensure those individuals are not taking advantage of America's generosity and good will.
Bill Shuster
#41. Never give up! it is wiser and betterAlways to hope, than once to despair.Fling off the load of Doubt's cankering fetter,And break the dark spell of tyrannical care.
Martin Farquhar Tupper
#42. The viscountess had raised the forefinger of her right hand and made a pretty gesture toward a stool at her feet. There was such intense tyrannical passion in the gesture that the marquis relinquished the doorknob and came back.
Honore De Balzac
#43. When the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or in the same body of magistrates, there can be no liberty; because apprehensions may arise, lest the same monarch or senate should enact tyrannical laws, to execute them in a tyrannical manner.
Charles De Secondat
#44. Ruthless, greedy, tyrannical, disreputable ... they have had one principle worth all the rest, the principle of delight!
Kenneth Clark
#45. For a government,' said the god, 'is nothing but a mirror of your minds--tyrannical for tyrants--hypocritical for hypocrites --corrupt for those who are indifferent--extravagant and wasteful for the selfish--strong and honorable only toward honest men.
Talbot Mundy
#46. Anorexia was my attempt to have control over my body and manipulate my body and starve my body and shape my body. It was not a very good relationship. It was the sort of relationship my father had to my body. It was a tyrannical, "you'll do what I tell you" relationship.
Eve Ensler
#47. To fight tyranny and oppression by using tyrannical and oppressive means, to combat a single-minded and ruthless fanaticism by becoming equally fanatical and ruthless, will not further the cause of justice or bring about a meaningful democracy. It can only prolong the cycle of violence.
Tariq Ali
#48. Environmental degradation is one of the biggest challenges we have. I think a question that we're not asking ourselves is: 'Isn't humanity committing suicide with this indiscriminate and tyrannical use of nature?'
Pope Francis
#49. Poetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline. You've got to go so far so fast in such a small space; you've got to burn away all the peripherals.
Sylvia Plath
#50. Some people cannot bear the truth, no matter how tactfully it is told. No doubt the haughty, the tyrannical, the unmerciful, the impure and the fomentors of discord take a fierce exception to the Sermon on the Mount.
Mary Church Terrell
#51. [A] mere demarcation on parchment of the constitutional limits of the several departments is not a sufficient guard against those encroachments which lead to a tyrannical concentration of all the powers of government in the same hands.
James Madison
#52. For the Christian there can be no social or political panaceas, no easy escapes from personal responsibility achieved by collectivising guilt or virtue. The true ends of temporal life lie beyond it, and, though the tyrannical State may diminish virtue, the benevolent State cannot procure it.
Margaret Thatcher
#53. Where I stand at is on the Second Amendment where the right to bear arms is not just for hunting and fishing and things like that. But it's the right of the American people to have a means of defense against a tyrannical government. So, sometimes you got to have that back-up plan.
Big Boi
#54. The ecclesiastical establishments of Europe which serve to support tyrannical governments are not the Christian religion but abuses and corruptions of it.
Noah Webster
#55. I thought I had finished with romantic adventures, but half-way through life and well past the age for losing one's heart, I was suddenly swept off my feet by a new love, a passionate, tyrannical, all-absorbing emotion: the love of a garden.
Patience Strong
#56. Tsars were autocrats, often tyrannical, who held total control over everything and everyone in Russia,
Roy A. Adkins
#57. I felt in him what women feel in men, something so tender, swollen, tyrannical, absurd; I would never take the consequences of interfering with it.
Alice Munro
#58. The main political problem is how to prevent the police power from becoming tyrannical. This is the meaning of all the struggles for liberty.
Ludwig Von Mises
#59. When legislative power is united with executive power in a single person or in a simple body of magistracy, there is no liberty, because one can fear that the same monarch or senate that makes tyrannical laws will execute them tyrannically. . . .
Mark R. Levin
#60. Mankind will in time discover that unbridled majorities are as tyrannical and cruel as unlimited despots.
John Adams
#61. 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
#62. THE time, it is to be hoped, is gone by when any defence would be necessary of the "liberty of the press" as one of the securities against corrupt or tyrannical government.
John Stuart Mill
#63. Believe that severity, violence, slavery, danger in the street and in the heart, secrecy, stoicism, tempter's art and devilry of every kind, - that everything wicked, terrible, tyrannical, predatory, and serpentine in man, serves as well for the elevation of the human species as its opposite
Friedrich Nietzsche
#64. Growing up in Pakistan in the 1980s, I lived in the shadow of a tyrannical state.
Mohsin Hamid
#65. A person can allow a tyrannical world to bully them. One can kowtow to the demands of petty tormentors; blithely accept being the drummer boy for other people's private parade. Alternatively, a person can seek to obtain autonomy over their life.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#66. Is there any chance you'd overthrow the tyrannical Beast Lord and his psychotic consort?" "Yeah, I want a vacation." -Kate & Curran to Jim
Ilona Andrews
#67. The system that existed in Germany at that time tragically prevented the people from protecting themselves from tyrannical government. This is a system many people vehemently want to impose in America.
Ron Paul
#68. When Mary Lennox was sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with her uncle everybody said she was the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen. It was true too ... she was as tyrannical and selfish a little pig as ever lived.
Frances Hodgson Burnett
#69. The Unexpected Gift
Torn asunder from her slumber
in the hour of half past three
The child knew the tyrannical regime
and followed instinctively.
-(slice from Enigmatic Evolution)
Muse
#70. Feudalism, serfdom, slavery, all tyrannical institutions, are merely the most vigorous kind to rule, springing out of, and necessarily to, a bad state of man. The progress from these is the same in all cases - less government.
Herbert Spencer
#71. Reason is not a tyrannical God like Allah, or a bloodthirsty demon like Bhowanee; Reason does not speak in my ears but gives me ears to listen with.
Tabish Khair
#72. Government is at best a petulant servant and at worst a tyrannical master.
George Washington
#73. rape of a woman. One of the sons of Rome's tyrannical king ravished Lucretia, a pure young wife. She told her husband and her father of this,
Phyllis T. Smith
#74. All governments, the worst on earth, and the most tyrannical on earth, are free governments to that portion of the people who voluntarily support them.
Lysander Spooner
#75. There is a tyrannical element in all fanaticism, an element which makes opposition a torment.
Mary Augusta Ward
#76. Who is open without levity; generous without waste; secret without craft; humble without meanness; bold without insolence; cautious without anxiety; regular, yet not formal; mild, yet not timid; firm, yet not tyrannical
is made to pass the ordeal of honor, friendship, virtue.
Johann Kaspar Lavater
#77. As every artist who has used the method knows - photography's a loyal slave and a tyrannical master.
Robert Genn
#78. But we must understand that emotions are unreliable and at times, tyrannical. They should never be permitted to dominate us.
James C. Dobson
#79. In general, literature is a natural adversary of totalitarianism. Tyrannical governments all view literature in the same way: as their enemy. I lived for a long time in a totalitarian state, and I know firsthand that horror.
Ismail Kadare
#80. My God, these Feeling types! ... Sensitive people are just tyrannical people - everybody else has to adapt to them.
Marie-Louise Von Franz
#81. There is nothing more tyrannical than a strong popular feeling among a democratic people.
Anthony Trollope
#82. Tyranny seldom announces itself ... In fact, a tyranny may exist without an individual tyrant. A whole government, even a democratically elected one, may be tyrannical.
Joseph Sobran
#83. The real damper on employee engagement is the soggy, cold blanket of centralized authority. In most companies, power cascades downwards from the CEO. Not only are employees disenfranchised from most policy decisions, they lack even the power to rebel against egocentric and tyrannical supervisors.
Gary Hamel
#84. If anything had or could have a value equal to gold and silver, it would require no tender law; and if it had not that value it ought not to have such a law; and, therefore, all tender laws are tyrannical and unjust and calculated to support fraud and oppression.
Thomas Paine
#85. Legislatures have no right to set up an inquisition and examine into the private opinions of men. Test-laws are useless and ineffectual, unjust and tyrannical.
Oliver Ellsworth
#86. 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
#87. I think forcing people to uncover their head is as tyrannical as forcing them to cover it.
Mustafa Akyol
#88. Public opinion is always more tyrannical towards those who obviously fear it than towards those who feel indifferent to it.
Bertrand Russell
#89. Some dying men are the most tyrannical; and certainly, since they will shortly trouble us so little for evermore, the poor fellows ought to be indulged.
Herman Melville
#90. Justice without force is powerless; force without justice is tyrannical.
Blaise Pascal
#91. Every great idea exerts, on first appearing, a tyrannical influence: Hence, the advantages it brings are turned all too soon into disadvantages.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#92. Then who is more miserable? One of whom I am about to speak. Who is that? He who is of a tyrannical nature, and instead of leading a private life has been cursed with the further misfortune of being a public tyrant. From
Plato
#93. Freedom is not won by merely overthrowing a tyrannical ruler or an oppressive regime. That is usually only the prelude to a new tyranny, a new oppression.
Jonathan Sacks
#94. For those who have little are not equally held in subjection by their possessions as those who overflow with affluence, for then the love of it becomes more tyrannical. The increase of acquisitions kindles the flame more, and renders those who possess them poorer.
John Chrysostom
#95. If it be true that the world has lost its respect for authority, it is only because it lost it first in the home. By a peculiar paradox, as the home loses its authority, the authority of the state becomes tyrannical.
Fulton J. Sheen
#96. Give them a corrupt House of Lords, give them a venal House of Commons, give they a tyrannical Prince, give them a truckling court, and let me have but an unfettered press. I will defy them to encroach a hair's breadth upon the liberties of England.
Richard Brinsley Sheridan
#97. The people, when they have been unchecked, have been as unjust, tyrannical, brutal, barbarous, and cruel, as any king or senate possessed of uncontrollable power. The majority has eternally, and without one exception, usurped over the rights of the minority.
John Adams
#98. Yes, from drinking too much beer and generally being a tyrannical egomaniac.
Sarah Dalton
#99. If you feel driven to feed the poor, get your checkbook out and keep your tyrannical mouth shut about it.
Lewis Goldberg
#100. Democratic institutions form a system of quarantine for tyrannical desires.
Friedrich Nietzsche
