Tyranny's Quotes

#1. Freedom is sloppy. But since tyranny's the only guaranteed byproduct of those who insist on a perfect world, freedom will have to do.

Bill Willingham

#2. Democracy, then, in the centralizing, pattern-making, absolutist shape which we have given to it is, it is clear, the time of tyranny's incubation.

Bertrand De Jouvenel

#3. For somehow this is tyranny's disease, to trust no friends.

Aeschylus

#4. And of all plagues with which mankind are curst, Ecclesiastic tyranny's the worst.

Daniel Defoe

#5. What is the greater good but tyranny's chameleon?

Karen Marie Moning

#6. 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

#7. And of all the plagues with which mankind are cursed, Ecclesiastic tyranny's the worst.

Daniel Defoe

#8. Catholics get on well with tyranny. It's in the culture.

Richard K. Morgan

#9. Although characterized as uncultured and unread, Hitler comes off in his demands to create a monumental signature for a Greater Germany as historically and artistically gifted."
-- Hitler: Beyond Evil and Tyranny, p. 32

Russel H.S. Stolfi

#10. T's [King James Bible] subject is majesty, not tyranny, and it's political purpose was unifying and enfolding, to elide the kingliness of God with the godliness of kings, to make royal power and divine glory into one invisible garment which could be wrapped around the nation as a whole.

Adam Nicolson

#11. War provides an outlet for every evil element in man's nature. It enfranchises cupidity and greed gives a charter to petty tyranny, glorifies cruelty and places in positions of power the vulgar and base.

C.E.M. Joad

#12. Compromise, hell! That's what has happened to us all down the line
and that's the very cause of our woes. If freedom is right and tyranny is wrong, why should those who believe in freedom treat it as if it were a roll of bologna to be bartered a slice at a time?

Jesse Helms

#13. I feel that the Second Amendment is the right to keep and bear arms for our citizenry. This not for someone who's in the military. This is not for law enforcement. This is for us. And, in fact, when you read that Constitution and the Founding Fathers, they intended this to stop tyranny.

Sharron Angle

#14. Our enemies send other people's children on missions of suicide and murder. They embrace tyranny and death as a cause and a creed. We stand for a different choice - made long ago, on the day of our founding. We affirm it again today. We choose freedom and the dignity of every life.

George W. Bush

#15. In 1890, Donnelly published Caesar's Column, a dystopian science fiction novel set in the far-off 1980s, when the United States had become a capitalist tyranny controlled by a ruthless Jewish oligarchy.

Arthur Goldwag

#16. The conviction of tragedy that rises out of his [John Dos Passos's] work is the steady protest of a sensitive democratic conscience against the tyranny and the ugliness of society, against the failure of a complete human development under industrial capitalism.

Alfred Kazin

#17. There's a certain amount of tyranny in all of us to some extent, and in some people it's much more developed than in others. It's a different balance which makes us all different.

Paula Fox

#18. What kind of person actually sits down and decides that no one should be allowed to end a sentence with a preposition? Not even decide what ideas you should or shouldn't talk about, but to actually make rules about what order to put your words in ... It's such an amazing kind of petty tyranny.

Jonathan Blum Kate Orman

#19. For somehow this disease inheres in tyranny, never to trust one's friends.

Aeschylus

#20. It's all very well to put the government in the hands of the perfect man, but what do you do when the perfect man gets a bellyache?

David Eddings

#21. They know the importance of their mission and of America's commitment to combating and defeating terrorism abroad, and they know that they are making a real difference in bringing freedom to a part of the world that has known only tyranny.

John Boehner

#22. From a generation that came of age during the Great Depression, millions of our country's best and bravest took up arms in a worldwide struggle against tyranny.

Steve Buyer

#23. We've made a devil's pact, swapping convenience and efficiency for an ever-increasing tyranny of information and choice.

Amy Webb

#24. Woman's ability to earn money is better protection against the tyranny and brutality of men than her ability to vote.

Victoria Woodhull

#25. It's good that the first half of the speech emphasized freedom, because George W. Bush has been the global champion for freedom. As he said, if we don't fight tyranny it will not leave us alone in peace.

Ernest Istook

#26. Let's be clear about one indisputable fact: capitalism vigorously pursued has never produced the atrocities - starvation, tyranny, and genocide - that are produced by statism vigorously pursued. Nothing remotely close.

Donald J. Boudreaux

#27. Seventy years ago this November, Vladimir Lenin created the modern totalitarian state, transforming simpler forms of tyranny into history's most sophisticated apparatus of rule by terror.

Michael Johns

#28. How quickly pettiness returns, and that most ignoble form of real estate, the possessive occupation and tyranny over two square inches of human flesh, the wife's cunt.

Leonard Cohen

#29. Trapped and tormented by your own wishes. I knew intimately how that felt; I was often strangled by the tyranny of my desires.

S. Jae-Jones

#30. This means nothing less than that he will be forced to be free. Once more a humanistic utopianism ends in tyranny, whether in Rousseau's writing or in the Reign of Terror which carried his position to its conclusion. Robespierre,

Francis A. Schaeffer

#31. The erosion of a nation's concern for life and for individual rights, has always preceded the intrusion of tyranny.

Gerry Spence

#32. Let's win the peace and democracy the good people of Iraq so richly deserve after decades of tyranny.

Mike Pence

#33. Today the aggressor is the shepherd of peace, and the beaten and hunted are the troublemakers of the world. What's more, there are whole races who believe it!

Erich Maria Remarque

#34. Who doubting tyranny, and fainting under Fortune's false lottery, desperately run To death, for dread of death; that soul's most stout, That, bearing all mischance, dares last it out.

Francis Beaumont

#35. The intellectually-inclined biographers stray from the point that the message is directed through the spoken word at the broad masses and not writing to an inbred, self-adoring intellectual elite."
--Hitler: Beyond Evil and Tyranny, pp. 30-31

Russel H.S. Stolfi

#36. The human condition for the vast majority of people on this planet for the entire time of what humanity has been here has been bondage and tyranny, dictatorship, pestilence. That's really what American exceptionalism is, when you get right down to it.

Rush Limbaugh

#37. In France, I guess there's something like a tyranny in mentalities - we accept success badly, beauty, money. People are certainly envious, and this creates negative energy. This is annoying. I suffered a great deal at one time. I had to fight harder than others. Add to that my marriage to Polanski.

Emmanuelle Seigner

#38. Subjugation requires vigilance; if you relax your brutality even for a moment, the people you're oppressing will revolt at the first sign of weakness. That's why dictatorial regimes are always a slippery slope of cruelty doomed to end in failure.

Nenia Campbell

#39. I'm enjoying my life, post-menopause, so much. It's just so great to grow into yourself, and not be bothered with all that tyranny of biology.

Roseanne Barr

#40. No totalitarians, no wars, no fears, famines or perils of any kind can really break a man's spirit until he breaks it himself by surrendering. Tyranny has many dread powers, but not the power to rule the spirit.

Edgar S. Brightman

#41. The irony of commitment is that it's deeply liberating -- in work, in play, in love. The act frees you from the tyranny of your internal critic, from the fear that likes to dress itself up and parade around like rational hesitation. To commit is to remove your head as the barrier to your life.

Anne Morris

#42. A lot of people tend to glorify the role of satire and comedians. They put them up as role models, as fighters for the truth and against tyranny, and I think that's overrated.

Bassem Youssef

#43. And wherever men are fighting against barbarism, tyranny, and massacre, for freedom, law, and honour, let them remember that the fame of their deeds, even though they themselves be exterminated, may perhaps be celebrated as long as the world rolls round.

Winston S. Churchill

#44. And in contrast to the Communist revolution in Russia and the Communist attempts at revolution in Germany from 1918 through 1923, Hitler's were virtually bloodless."
-- Hitler: Beyond Evil and Tyranny, p. 44

Russel H.S. Stolfi

#45. When the people are afraid of the government, that's tyranny. But when the government is afraid of the people, that's liberty.

Thomas Jefferson

#46. Whenever a person holds onto personal rights, he sets himself up for the tyranny of fear when those rights are threatened. The only way to be free to experience God's will is to go thruogh life with a loose grip on everything around us. He is the only security we have life - and He is enough!

Steve McVey

#47. Thomas Hobbes's politics are fitted only to promote tyranny, and his ethics to encourage licentiousness.

David Hume

#48. As concerns the question of the psychological engine that drove Hitler, the conventional interpretation of lusting after power is, in final analysis, the refuge of lack of comprehension."
-- Hitler: Beyond Evil and Tyranny, p. 27

Russel H.S. Stolfi

#49. He's spent all his life in good-natured rebellion against the tyranny of the unimportant.

Robin Hardy

#50. And it's always the same kind of artist, I think, who has more enjoyment being slightly on the outside of things, who doesn't want to be sucked into the tyranny of the mainstream. Because once you get sucked into that, you're dead as an artist.

David Bowie

#51. When scrutiny is lacking, tyranny, corruption and man's baser qualities have a better chance of entering into the public business of any government.

Jacob K. Javits

#52. A solid routine fosters a well-worn groove for one's mental energies and helps stave off the tyranny of moods.

Mason Currey

#53. And this spreading usurpation of the world was so dexterously performed - a proteus - hundreds of banks, companies, syndicates, masked the Council's operations - that it was already far advanced before common men suspected the tyranny that had come. The

H.G.Wells

#54. It seems to me there's this tyranny that's not accidental or incidental, to make women feel compelled to look like somebody they're not. I think the effort is being made to get us to turn our time and attention to this instead of important political issues.

Eve Ensler

#55. There are only two roads, victory for the working class, freedom, or victory for the fascists which means tyranny. Both combatants know what's in store for the loser.

Buenaventura Durruti

#56. The right to bear arms is because it's the last form of defense against tyranny.

Ice-T

#57. 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

#58. We all of us seem to have this belief that things are going to get better. Why should they? Sometimes I think we're moving into a new ice age of tyranny and terror, why not? Who's to stop it - us?

Doris Lessing

#59. Orwell's '1984' convinced me, rightly or wrongly, that Marxism was only a quantum leap away from tyranny. By contrast, Huxley's 'Brave New World' suggested that the totalitarian systems of the future might be subservient and ingratiating.

J.G. Ballard

#60. That's how tyranny succeeds. When folks think it won't affect them until eventually it does.

Karen Traviss

#61. The framers hated the tyranny of King George, but they were also afraid of the mob. That's why they put so many checks and balances into our system, to guard against the excesses of a government that might be inflamed by public passion or perverted by a dictator's whim.

David Ignatius

#62. A knowledge of different literatures is the best way to free one's self from the tyranny of any of them.

Jose Marti

#63. See, you don't wanna be a Jew. Too much work--there's a lot of holidays but it's even more work. It's sanctioned oppression, it's God's tyranny.

Shawn Stewart Ruff

#64. It's the tyranny of an oligarchy that I'm concerned about.

Pat Robertson

#65. [The Bill of Rights is] designed to protect individuals and minorities against the tyranny of the majority, but it's also designed to protect the people against bureaucracy, against the government.

Laurence Tribe

#66. To be a film director is not a democracy, it's really a tyranny. You're the head of the project, for better rather than worse. I write the film and I direct the film, I decide who's going to be in it, I decide on the editing, I put in the music from my own record collection.

Woody Allen

#67. It's not tyranny we desire; it's a just, limited, federal government.

Alexander Hamilton

#68. The body is but a vessel for the soul, a puppet which bends to the soul's tyranny. And lo, the body is not eternal, for it must feed on the flesh of others, lest it return to the dust from whence it came. Therefore must the soul deceive, despise and murder men.

A.J. Durai

#69. The act of voting by ordinary Iraqis in the face of extreme danger confirms President Bush's belief that people around the globe, when given a chance, will choose liberty and democracy over enslavement and tyranny.

John Ensign

#70. The first sign of tyranny is government's complicity in privatizing the commons for private gain.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

#71. (...)it seems more probable that his anti-Semitism was less emotional and more objective than has been assumed to the present."
-- Hitler: Beyond Evil and Tyranny, p. 37

Russel H.S. Stolfi

#72. The fear of the violent and the lawless is no less a tyranny than the edicts that come from the Emperor's throne.

Timothy Zahn

#73. I'd lost myself in the abyss of someone else's tyranny ... again.

Cassandra Giovanni

#74. I think it's very humble to believe that there is no man, woman or child who should live in tyranny. That people who say, well, maybe Arabs just aren't ready for democracy or maybe Africans just are going to have corrupt governments, that seems to me arrogant.

Condoleezza Rice

#75. In order to be heard by the oppressing class, one must speak as a member of it. Not only the language, but the diction. The accusation of tyranny, however well-founded in fact, is dismissed unless it is delivered in the manner that power recognizes as powerful.

James S.A. Corey

#76. The tyranny of this dictatorship isn't primarily the fault of Big Business, nor of the demagogues who do their dirty work. It's the fault of Doremus Jessup! Of all the conscientious, respectable, lazy-minded Doremus Jessups, who have let the demogogues wriggle in, without fierce enough protest." 14

Sinclair Lewis

#77. Our liberty will not be secured at the sword's point ... We must secure it by making ourselves worthy of it. And when the people reaches that height, God will provide a weapon, the idols will be shattered, tyranny will crumble like a house of cards, and liberty will shine out like the first dawn.

Jose Rizal

#78. To comprehend the Hitler of 1919 is to comprehend the Hitler of the entire period from 1919 through 1945."
--Hitler: Beyond Evil and Tyranny, p. 35

Russel H.S. Stolfi

#79. Thus Tyrants could practice, in a sense, "democracy." But now "democracy" can do the same work without any tyranny other than her own.

C.S. Lewis

#80. Call me an alarmist, but we are witnessing the beginning of the most frightening period of government tyranny in our nation's history.

David Limbaugh

#81. If it's a despot you would dethrone, see first that his throne erected within you is destroyed.

Khalil Gibran

#82. Yeah, it's legal in the United States. It's part of our Constitution. You know, the right to bear arms is because that's the last form of defense against tyranny. Not to hunt. It's to protect yourself from the police.

Ice-T

#83. Resistance to tyranny is man's highest ideal.

Emma Goldman

#84. There's a dishonest tyranny in the liberal/progressive/socialist agenda that comes down and says 'we are here because we care about you; we want what's best for you'. But really what they want is the control of your life.

Allen West

#85. Well now," the scholar went on, "I'm just an old fuddy-duddy who could use a tan, so you needn't grant my opinion any authority, but I consider the queendom lucky that a handful of Milliners and their children lived incognito among the population during Redd's tyranny.

Frank Beddor

#86. But if there's an erosion at home, you know, Thomas Jefferson warned about a tyranny of an oligarchy and if we surrender our democracy to the tyranny of an oligarchy, we've made a terrible mistake.

Pat Robertson

#87. Recent school shootings have lured ill-informed Americans into a war on our Second Amendment guarantees, led by the nation's tyrants and their useful idiots ... The Second Amendment was given to us as protection against tyranny by the federal government and the Congress of the United States.

Walter E. Williams

#88. It's a law of life: the tyranny of things.

Randy Alcorn

#89. 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

#90. The 5th Amendment is an old friend and a good friend. one of the great landmarks in men's struggle to be free of tyranny, to be decent and civilized.

William O. Douglas

#91. Oh God, the terrible tyranny of the majority. We all have our harps to play. And it's up to you to know with which ear you'll listen.

Ray Bradbury

#92. There's a huge cost to freedom in letting people talk about how you print these plastic guns or letting them say these things about arming for tyranny. There's also a cost to letting the government say these ideas can't be expressed, this is treason. It's difficult.

Glenn Greenwald

#93. His kindly rule replaced sin's tyranny.

Anonymous

#94. In today's ambiguous world, character means despotism, tyranny, absolute intolerance. At last it is time to admire a lack of character, inner weakness. Our epoch is that of noble doubts, blessed uncertainty, sacred hypersensitivity, divine wishy-washiness.

Tadeusz Konwicki

#95. One reproduces only that which is striking; that is to say, the necessary. Thus, one's recollections and inventions are liberated from the tyranny which nature exerts.

Edgar Degas

#96. Tyranny and fantasy both like to write everyone else's lines.

James Richardson

#97. The great biographers take excessive liberties in denigrating his person, and, in doing so, they make it difficult to comprehend him."
-- Hitler: Beyond Evil and Tyranny, p. 17

Russel H.S. Stolfi

#98. 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

#99. Free society's organize around the "invisible hand" while Force society's organize around the State's "visible fist.

Orrin Woodward

#100. 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