Authoritarian Government Quotes

If we as Christians do not speak out as authoritarian governments grow from within or come from outside, eventually we or our children will be the enemy of society and the state. No truly authoritarian government can tolerate those who have real absolute by which to judge its arbitrary absolutes and who speak out and act upon that absolute. ~ Francis A. Schaeffer

We are at heart so profoundly anarchistic that the only form of state we can imagine living in is Utopian; and so cynical that the only Utopia we can believe in is authoritarian. ~ Lionel Trilling

Leadership must be likeable, affable, cordial, and above all emotional. The fashion of authoritarian leadership is gone. Football is about life. You can't be angry all day. ~ Vicente Del Bosque

Hong Kong has been the place where the memory of Tiananmen Square lives on; Hong Kong people have become more and more committed in their resistance to authoritarian government, and also, not surprisingly, committed to safeguarding their culture and heritage as something distinct and worth preserving. ~ Jess Row

Once people sense their own power, no authoritarian government can stand against the people who are determined to be free. ~ Tsakhiagiin Elbegdorj

In the late twentieth century democracies usually outperformed dictatorships because democracies were better at data-processing. Democracy diffuses the power to process information and make decisions among many people and institutions, whereas dictatorship concentrates information and power in one place. Given twentieth-century technology, it was inefficient to concentrate too much information and power in one place. Nobody had the ability to process all the information fast enough and make the right decisions. This is part of the reason why the Soviet Union made far worse decisions than the United States, and why the Soviet economy lagged far behind the American economy.

"However, soon AI might swing the pendulum in the opposite direction. AI makes it possible to process enormous amounts of information centrally. Indeed, AI might make centralised systems far more efficient than diffused systems, because machine learning works better the more information it can analyse. If you concentrate all the information relating to a billion people in one database, disregarding all privacy concerns, you can train much better algorithms than if you respect individual privacy and have in your database only partial information on a million people. For example, if an authoritarian government orders all its citizens to have their DNA scanned and to share all their medical data with some central authority, it would gain an immense advantage in genetics and medical research over soci ~ Yuval Noah Harari

Even the striving for equality by means of a directed economy can result only in an officially enforced inequality - an authoritarian determination of the status of each individual in the new hierarchical order. ~ Friedrich August Von Hayek

Disappointment over nationalistic authoritarian regimes may have contributed to the fact that today religion offers a new and subjectively more convincing language for old political orientations. ~ Jurgen Habermas

Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear, a sense of the imminence of takeover by aliens and real diseases are useful material. ~ Susan Sontag

As a teacher, my strategy is to encourage questioning. I'm the least authoritarian professor you'll ever meet. ~ Niall Ferguson

History proves that all dictatorships, all authoritarian forms of government are transient. Only democratic systems are not transient. Whatever the shortcomings, mankind has not devised anything superior. ~ Vladimir Putin

(...) psychologist Wilhelm Reich theorized that the suppression of sexuality was essential to an authoritarian government. Without the imposition of antisexual morality, he believed, people would be free from shame and would trust their own sense of right and wrong. They would be unlikely to march to war against their wishes, or to operate death camps. Perhaps if we were raised without shame and guilt about our desires, we might be freer people in more ways than simply the sexual. ~ Dossie Easton

Asia's governments come in two broad varieties: young, fragile democracies - and older, fragile authoritarian regimes. ~ Paul Samuelson

Free nations of the world cannot allow Taiwan, a beacon of democracy, to be subdued by an authoritarian China. ~ Nick Lampson

To make no decision in regard to the growth of authoritarian government is already a decision for it. ~ Francis A. Schaeffer

China is building a model for how an authoritarian government can survive the Internet. ~ Rebecca MacKinnon

Democracy acknowledges the right to differ as well as the duty to settle differences peacefully. Authoritarian governments see criticism of their actions and doctrines as a challenge to combat. ~ Aung San Suu Kyi

It has been the scheme of the Christian Church, and of all the other invented systems of religion, to hold man in ignorance of the Creator, as it is of Government to hold man in ignorance of his rights. The systems of the one are as false as those of the other, and are calculated for mutual support. ~ Thomas Paine

The account of how a form of American slavery persisted into the twentieth century, embraced by the U.S. economic system and abided at all levels of government, offered a concrete answer to that fear for the first time. ~ Douglas A. Blackmon

Only when a republic's life is in danger should a man uphold his government when it is wrong. There is no other time. ~ Mark Twain

Jackson gazed deeply into his son's eyes as he prepared to tell him the reason why life was so easy and prosperous; the secret behind the most lucrative contracts in the country, including the government. He wanted to explain all of this to Jonathan, and he would, but he knew he'd have to journey back more than 150 years. ~ Herbert C. Robinson

Religion has everything on its side: revelation, prophecies, government protection, the highest dignity and eminence ... and more than this, the invaluable prerogative of being allowed to imprint its doctrines on the mind at a tender age of childhood, whereby they become almost innate ideas. ~ Irvin D. Yalom

Unlimited enmity of the Albanian people against Serbia is the foremost real result of the Albanian policies of the Serbian government. The second and more dangerous result is the strengthening of two big powers in Albania, which have the greatest interests in the Balkans. ~ Dimitrije Tucovic

The problem of South Africa is different than the world thinks. There is no native problem. The native worker gets more than white workers do in England! [ ... ] The South African government is not a police state. It's easier on people than the United States government! ~ L. Ron Hubbard

When all the objectives of government include the achievement of equality - other than equality before the law - that government poses a threat to liberty. ~ Margaret Thatcher

We Americans" is a fabrication of the rulers. There are the tens and tens and tens of millions of workers and farmers in the United States; we are part of a "we" with our class brothers and sisters throughout the world. There is a "they": the tiny handful of propertied families in whose interests the imperialist United States government acts at home and abroad. It is "they," their state, that "we" must overthrow in order to end imperialism's inexorable advance toward deepening crisis, violence, brutality, and devastation - toward fascism and world war. ~ Jack Barnes

The ones who are insane enough to think that they can rule the world are always the ones who do. ~ Stefan Molyneux

Of all debts, men are least willing to pay their taxes; what a satire this is on government. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

[I]f the policy of the Government, upon vital questions affecting, the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made, in ordinary litigation between parties in personal actions, the people will have ceased, to be their own rulers, having, to that extent, practically resigned their Government, into the hands of that eminent tribunal. ~ Abraham Lincoln

The Founding Fathers realized that "the power to tax is the power to destroy," which is why they did not give the Federal government the power to impose an income tax. Needless to say, the Founders would be horrified to know that Americans today give more than a third of their income to the Federal government. ~ Ron Paul

I don't think any government has the means to protect us from the world reality. ~ Jean Lapierre

People don't change under governments. Governments change. People remain the same. ~ Will Rogers

I would wager that my job has helped save our economy from the economic ravages of out-of-control environmental extremism. I view my job a little like a legislator, supported by the taxpayer, to protect the interests of the taxpayer and to minimize the role of government. ~ Roy Spencer

My heart goes out to the brave citizens of Syria, who each day risk and even sacrifice their lives to achieve freedom from a murderous regime. We in Israel welcome the historic struggle to forge democratic, peace-loving governments in our region. ~ Shimon Peres

They want to keep the government 'out of our bedrooms.' What are they talking about? I have to live in their society, remember. And I built my house, which means I built my own bedroom. The government told me how far apart the studs had to be in my bedroom wall, they dictated how thick the sheetrock had to be, they mandated how far apart the sheetrock screws had to be, they had policies on the configuration of those sheetrock screws, they have laws on the size of the windows and what kind of glass I can have in them, and there are stern legal warnings on the mattress tags. What do you mean, you want to keep the government out of our bedrooms? The president is probably contemplating, right this minute, the establishment of a bedroom czar. ~ Douglas Wilson

I am always looking for ways our government can help make everyday life easier for Ontarians, and these new polymer birth certificates do just that. Having a safe and durable birth certificate will provide more security and help protect people from fraud and identify theft. ~ Kathleen Wynne

How can we protect homeland security unless the government stops the invasion of illegal aliens? ~ Phyllis Schlafly

Some years ago, the federal government declared war on poverty, and poverty won. ~ Ronald Reagan

The Government of India had imprisoned Mr. Gandhi and they had been sitting outside his cell door begging him to help them out of their difficulties. ~ Winston Churchill

Your liberals and radicals all want to govern. They want to try it their way
to show that people will be happier if the power is wielded in a different way or for different purposes. But how do they know? Have they ever tried it? No, it's merely their guess. ~ B.F. Skinner

I think it true that, you know, sometimes things start to change even before a government changes and, actually, I think you can begin to see even the Labour machine beginning to understand that it has become over-reliant on targets and processes, that local governments have been over-bossed and bullied. ~ David Cameron

When I wrote my eighth thriller, 'Inside Out,' in 2009, the villains were a group of CIA and other government officials who colluded to destroy a series of tapes depicting Americans torturing war-on-terror prisoners. ~ Barry Eisler

This is the joint responsibility of everyone who was involved in the introduction of the euro without understanding the consequences. When the euro was introduced, the regulators allowed banks to buy unlimited amounts of government bonds without setting aside any equity capital. And the European Central Bank discounted all government bonds on equal terms. So commercial banks found it advantageous to accumulate the bonds of the weaker countries to earn a few extra basis points. ~ George Soros

The government should do its job. The government's job is, in fact, to run the country, to manage the country, to govern the country. And governance is an important thing, not application where it suits one so, to micro control where it suits them on the other hand. ~ Ratan Tata

The most upsetting thing is that the US is a leader in the world, and if they don't sign, then how do you expect to convince Russian and China and Iran, Pakistan, all these other countries, to sign? They simply won't. (The US government) feels it's against their constitutional right to bear arms, or they've said that it's needed in North and South Korea, on the border. I don't think any of these are good enough excuses for the damage. ~ Angelina Jolie

The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. ~ Noam Chomsky

Changing the course of destiny, so I'm strapped with weaponry cause the government don't give a f-k about protecting me. ~ Immortal Technique

There is a Western world. There is America. There is Great Britain and Germany and France and Russia and China and other nations. I doubt that there is one country amongst those I mentioned which has a desire to see Iran, with its fundamentalist, Islamic, extremist government, possessing nuclear weapons. ~ Ehud Olmert

When democratic governments create economic calamity, free markets get the blame. ~ Jack Kemp

I love all of the government conspiracy stuff. I love all of the shady backroom White House dealings that are going on, and all of the politics involved. That kind of stuff is just fascinating to me. ~ Michael Graziadei

My politics is my religion, my religion is my politics. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

In almost all matters, the real question should be: why are we letting government handle this? ~ Harry Browne

The injustices endured by black Americans at the hands of their own government have no parallel in our history, not only during the period of slavery but also in the Jim Crow era that followed. ~ Jim Webb

Where the law of the majority ceases to be acknowledged, there government ends; the law of the strongest takes its place, and life and property are his who can take them. ~ Thomas Jefferson