Tyrants Quotes

Its authors meant it to be ... a stumbling block to those who in after times might seek to turn a free people back into the hateful paths of despotism. They knew the proneness of prosperity to breed tyrants, and they meant when such should re-appear in this fair land and commence their vocation they should find left for them at least one hard nut to crack. ~ Abraham Lincoln

If I could I would!" is the maxim of tyrants. ~ Lamine Pearlheart

It is the lot of God's ministers not only to suffer opposition at the hand of a wicked world, but also to see the patient indoctrination of many years quickly undone by such religious fanatics. This hurts more than the persecution of tyrants. We are treated shabbily on the outside by tyrants, on the inside by those whom we have restored to the liberty of the Gospel, and also by false brethren. But this is our comfort and our glory, that being called of God we have the promise of everlasting life. We look for that reward which eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither hath entered into the heart of man. ~ Martin Luther

Christianity is not a law of bondage; and if it respect the hand of God which sometimes raises up tyrants, it draws up where obedience degenerates into guilty cowardice. ~ Jean-Baptiste Henri Lacordaire

Force always attracts men of low morality. ~ Albert Einstein

tyrants always set about shaping history after their liking. ~ Douglas Bond

Every successful revolution puts on in time the robes of the tyrant it has deposed. ~ Barbara Tuchman

Alan said he'd known what to expect from de St Jorre from the kick-off, since in his preface this cretin speaks of banned books being burnt in the same way heretics were burnt by religious tyrants. Alan was quick to denounce the cruel inhumanity of liberal fuckwits who wantonly blurred the lines between human life and products of a literary culture that had yet to escape its commodity form. ~ Stewart Home

At the very time that philosophers of the most enterprising benevolence were founding in Greece those institutions which have rendered it the wonder and luminary of the world, am I required to believe that the weak and wicked king of an obscure and barbarous nation, a murderer, a traitor and a tyrant, was the man after God's own heart? ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley

The just man having a firm grasp of his intentions, neither the heated passions of his fellow men ordaining something awful, nor a tyrant staring him in the face, will shake in his convictions. ~ Horace

Moral relativism has a reputation for being compassionate, caring and humane, but it is an extremely useful philosophy for tyrants. ~ Peter Kreeft

The divine right of kings may have been a plea for feeble tyrants, but the divine right of government is the keystone of human progress, and without it governments sink into police, and a nation is degraded into a mob. ~ Benjamin Disraeli

So the villains aren't gay-hating Islamists or women killing tyrants, but actually us: an American Congress bent on the apocalypse. Don't we understand? Iranians love their children too. ~ Greg Gutfeld

When it comes to tyrants, dictators and terrorists, strength and the threat of force is the only language they understand. ~ Kevin McCarthy

Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break into pieces. ~ Etienne De La Boetie

Woe is the mind of the common man, so easily controlled by the prospect of an ambition never to be truly attained. This is what tyrants live on and by what commoners are blissfully burdened and subdued. ~ Evan Meekins

Set before us the conduct of our own British ancestors, who defended for us the inherent rights of mankind against foreign and domestic tyrants and usurpers, against arbitrary kings and cruel priests; in short against the gates of earth and hell. ~ John Adams

Many of the greatest tyrants on the records of history have begun their reigns in the fairest manner. But the truth is, this unnatural power corrupts both the heart and the understanding. And to prevent the least hope of amendment, a king is ever surrounded by a crowd of infamous flatterers, who find their account in keeping him from the least light of reason, till all ideas of rectitude and justice are utterly erased from his mind. ~ Edmund Burke

One must never compromise with tyrants. One can only strike at kings through the head. Nothing can be expected from European kings except by force of arms. I vote for the death of the tyrant. ~ Georges Danton

The virtue of female slaves is wholly at the mercy of irresponsible tyrants, and women are bought and sold in our slave markets, to gratify the brutal lust of those who bear the name of Christians. ~ Sarah Moore Grimke

I don't really think in terms of the future of literature. I think literature will be around "forever" - but in a relatively niche way, like jazz and poetry, although probably more widely consumed than jazz and poetry since it's fundamentally a narrative form. And I think that's important and places like Word Riot and The New York Tyrant and n+1 will be responsible for keeping it alive. ~ Nick Antosca

Men are still men. The despot's wickedness Comes of ill teaching, and of power's excess,
Comes of the purple he from childhood wears, Slaves would be tyrants if the chance were theirs. ~ Victor Hugo

Writing, as most art, is considered to be essentially superfluous. Who is an artist before a surgeon? Or a scientist? But the fact that tyrants and political forces of every age have been threatened by art again and again, condemned it as degenerate or poisonous, and have silenced, brutalized, or murdered artists because of their work only serves to illustrate how significant art is, that it is our one greatest power. I would even go so far as to say that the tyrant 'understands' art more than the devotee, for the latter is generally too 'pious' and adoring, almost like a simple-minded believer overwrought by faith who simply loves and finds everything 'great,' whereas the former suffers the transformative threat of art more, is even endangered by it, hence their terror. ~ Rainer J. Hanshe

A tyrant is the worst disease, and the cause of all others. ~ William Blake

Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God. ~ Stephen R. Prothero

There's a big difference between a decisive manager and a tyrant. ~ Mary Kay Ash

A dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people than under the forbidden appearance of zeal for the firmness and efficiency of government. History will teach us that the former has been found a much more certain road to the introduction of despotism than the latter, and that of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants. ~ Alexander Hamilton

sight. In his essay On The Sublime, Edmund Burke observes, "Represent the most sublime and affecting tragedy we have...and when you have collected your audience, just at the moment when their minds are filled with expectation, let it be reported that a criminal is on the point of being executed in the adjoining square..." And in a moment, the theater will be empty. In these bloody rituals of execution and repression, the leader becomes the ancient God-King stepping forward to save his people, a promise as dangerous as it is seductive. If there is one lesson we can take away from the extravagant lives of our tyrants it is the fragility of our democratic society which, after all, is the exception, not the norm, in that dark, violent story known as human history. ~ Daniel Myerson

That's what tyrants do, I guess. They make you covet their attention; they make you confuse attention for mercy. ~ Gary Shteyngart

I have seen tyrants come and go, and each seems more invincible and more terrible than the last. They all fail. Empires arise and crumble. What matters is what each of us do where we are, when we are. ~ Christopher R. Taylor

What is hateful is not rebellion but the despotism which induces the rebellion; what is hateful are not rebels but the men, who, having the enjoyment of power, do not discharge the duties of power; they are the men who, having the power to redress wrongs, refuse to listen to the petitioners that are sent to them; they are the men who, when they are asked for a loaf, give a stone. ~ Wilfrid Laurier

And yet, for all this, for all that he was unparalleled in depicting tyrants knee-deep in blood, Shakespeare was a little naive. Because his monsters had doubts, bad dreams, pangs of conscience, guilt. They saw the spirits of those they had killed rising in front of them. But in real life, under real terror, what guilty conscience? What bad dreams? That was all sentimentality, false optimism, a hope that the world would be as we wanted it to be, rather than as it was. Those who chopped the wood and made the chips fly, those who smoked Belomory behind their desks at the Big House, those who signed the orders and made the telephone calls, closing a dossier and with it a life: how few of them had bad dreams, or ever saw the spirits of the dead rising to reproach them." (p 94) ~ Julian Barnes

There is no tyrant like custom, and no freedom where its edicts are not resisted. ~ Christian Nestell Bovee

The universal methodology of the tyrant is always incrementalism. ~ Derek R. Audette

Peoples of Egypt , you will be told that I have come to destroy your religion. Do not believe it! Reply that I have come to restore your rights! ~ Napoleon Bonaparte

Kings will be tyrants from policy when subjects are rebels from principle," Burke writes. ~ Yuval Levin

The king is as much bound by his oath not to infringe the legal rights of the people, as the people are bound to yield subjection to him. From whence it follows that as soon as the prince sets himself above the law, he loses the king in the tyrant. He does, to all intents and purposes, un-king himself. ~ Jonathan Mayhew

At that moment, in the sunset on Watership Down, there was offered to General Woundwort the opportunity to show whether he was really the leader of vision and genius which he believed himself to be, or whether he was no more than a tyrant with the courage and cunning of a pirate. For one beat of his pulse the lame rabbit's idea shone clearly before him. He grasped it and realized what it meant. The next, he had pushed it away from him. ~ Richard Adams

Laws become fragile under the influence of dictators. ~ Wayne Gerard Trotman

O slavish man! will you not bear with your own brother, who has God for his Father, as being a son from the same stock, and of the same high descent? But if you chance to be placed in some superior station, will you presently set yourself up for a tyrant? ~ Epictetus

In this, our age of infamy Man's choice is but to be A tyrant, traitor, prisoner: No other choice has he. ~ Alexander Pushkin

Secrets, silent, stony sit in the dark palaces of both our hearts: secrets weary of their tyranny: tyrants willing to be dethroned. ~ James Joyce

People who cannot restrain their own baser instincts, who cannot treat one another with civility, are not capable of self-government ... without virtue, a society can be ruled only by fear, a truth that tyrants understand all too well ~ Charles W. Colson

I'm many things: I'm a convicted rapist, I'm a hell-raiser, I'm a father, a loving father. I'm a semi-good husband ... I'm pretty much a tyrant-titan. ~ Mike Tyson

Your scorn for mediocrity blinds you to its vast primitive power. You stand in the glare of your own brilliance, unable to see into the dim corners of the room, to dilate your eyes and see the potential dangers of the mass, the wad of humanity. Even as I tell you this, dear student, you cannot quite believe that lesser men, in whatever numbers, can really defeat you. But we are in the age of the mediocre man. He is dull, colorless, boring - but inevitably victorious. The amoeba outlives the tiger because it divides and continues in its immortal monotony. The masses are the final tyrants. See how, in the arts, Kabuki wanes and withers while popular novels of violence and mindless action swamp the mind of the mass reader. And even in that timid genre, no author dares to produce a genuinely superior man as his hero, for in his rage of shame the mass man will send his yojimbo, the critic, to defend him. The roar of the plodders is inarticulate, but deafening. They have no brain, but they have a thousand arms to grasp and clutch at you, drag you down. ~ Trevanian

...only the one who knows and practices the iconoclastic fury of destruction can possess the joy born of freedom, of that unique freedom fertilized by sorrow. I rise up against the reality of the outer world for the triumph of the reality of my inner world. I reject society for the triumph of the I. I reject the stability of every rule, every custom, every morality, for the affirmation of every willful instinct, all free emotionality, every passion and every fantasy. I mock at every duty and every right so I can sing free will. I scorn the future to suffer and enjoy my good and my bad in the present. I despise humanity because it is not my humanity. I hate tyrants and I detest slaves. I don't want and I don't grant solidarity, because I am convinced that it is a new chain, and because I believe with Ibsen that the one who is most alone is the strongest one. This is my Nihilism. ~ Renzo Novatore

The only tyrant I accept in this world is the still voice within. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

A tyrant does not remain in the world; But the curse on him abides forever! ~ Bill Vaughan

Democracy was the right of the people to choose their own tyrant. ~ James Madison

But they don't use law-they use law for their interests. They don't go by law, international, federal, local-nothing! They go by whatever is expedient to protect the interests that are at stake. ~ Malcolm X

The preservation of a free government requires not merely that the metes and bounds which separate each department of power be invariably maintained; but more especially that neither of them be suffered to overleap the great Barrier which defends the rights of the people. The Rulers who are guilty of such an encroachment, exceed the commission from which they derive their authority and are Tyrants. The people who submit to it are governed by laws made neither by themselves nor by an authority derived from them, and are slaves. ~ James Madison

Notwithstanding my experiments with electricity the thunderbolt continues to fall under our noses and beards; and as for the tyrant, there are a million of us still engaged at snatching away his sceptre. ~ Benjamin Franklin

I never wanted to be feared. If I regret one thing, it is the fear I have caused. Fear is the tool of tyrants. Unfortunately, when the fate of the world is in question, you use whatever tools are available. ~ Brandon Sanderson

We are contrary creatures, us humans, but that isn't something we need be afraid of, or even much troubled by. And if you make a list of those people who worship consistency, you'll find they're one and all tyrants or would-be tyrants. Ruling over thousands, or over a husband or a wife, or some cowering child. Never fear contradiction, Cutter, it is the very heart of diversity. ~ Steven Erikson

I am a caster of nets. Tyrants and emperors rise and fall. Civilizations burgeon then die, but there are always casters of nets. And tillers of the soil, and herders in the pastures. We are where civilization begins, and when it ends, we are there to begin it again. ~ Steven Erikson

Despots are elected and deposed.
Laws are passed and repealed.
Nations rise and fall.
Individual liberty is eternal. ~ A.E. Samaan

But we know that freedom cannot be served by the devices of the tyrant. As it is an ancient truth that freedom cannot be legislated into existence, so it is no less obvious that freedom cannot be censored into existence. And any who act as if freedoms defenses are to be found in suppression and suspicion and fear confess a doctrine that is alien to America. ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower

Despotism increases in severity with the number of despots; the responsibility is more divided, and the claims are more numerous. ~ William Wells Brown

The president, who finds so much to complain about in other areas of the world, apparently saw nothing wrong in recognizing a Communist regime that has killed more people in its short history of control over the teeming millions of that great country than any other collection of dictators or tyrants in the history of the world. ~ Barry Goldwater

A man like me cannot live without a hobby-horse, a consuming passion - in Schiller's words a tyrant. I have found my tyrant, and in his service I know no limits. My tyrant is psychology. it has always been my distant, beckoning goal and now since I have hit upon the neuroses, it has come so much the nearer. ~ Sigmund Freud

When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty, and there is nothing more to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader. ~ Plato

The idea which tyrants find most useful is the idea of God. ~ Stendhal

It doesn't matter when. Tyrants have been regarded as wicked since olden times, but the twentieth century is full of the tyrants of whom we are speaking. Furthermore - and this is really detestable - they have a thick veneer of civilization. ~ Natsume Sōseki

The welfare of humanity is always the alibi of tyrants. ~ Albert Camus

Where once a tyrant had to wish that his subjects had but one common neck that he might strangle them all at once, all he has to do now is to 'educate the people' so that they will have but one common mind to delude. ~ Richard Mitchell

Every master of slaves is born a petty tyrant. They bring the judgment of heaven on a Country. As nations can not be rewarded or punished in the next world they must be in this. By an inevitable chain of causes & effects providence punishes national sins, by national calamities. ~ George Mason

The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty ... What country before ever existed a century and half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure. ~ Thomas Jefferson

To All My Mariners in One

Forget the many who talk much, say little, mean less and matter least
Forget we live in times when broadcasts of Tchaikovsky's 5th
precede announcements of the death of tyrants.
Forget that life for governments is priced war cheap but kidnap high
Our seamanship is not with such.
From port to port we learn that "depths last longer than heights",
that years are meant to disappear like wakes,
that nothing but the sun stands still.
We share the sweeter alphabets of laughter and the slower languages of pain.
Common as coal, we find in one another's eyes
the quiet diamonds that are worth the world.
Drawn by the song of our keel, who are we but horizons coming true?
Let others wear their memories like jewelry
We're of the few who work apart so well,
together when we must.
We speak cathedrals when we speak and
trust no promise but the pure supremacy of tears.
What more can we expect?
The sea's blue mischief may be waiting for its time and place,
but still we have the stars to guide us,
we have the winds for company.
We have ourselves.
We have the sailor's faith that not even dying can divide us. ~ Samuel Hazo

The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human. ~ Aldous Huxley

Public Opinion, this invisible, intangible, omnipresent, despotic tyrant; this thousand-headed Hydra - the more dangerous for being composed of individual mediocrities ... ~ H. P. Blavatsky

No matter what the greatest tyrant in the world, the greatest terrorist in the world, George W. Bush says, we're here to tell you: Not hundreds, not thousands, but millions of the American people ... support your revolution. ~ Harry Belafonte

This is how tyrants win the will of the people: with lies. ~ Terry Goodkind

History immortalises both the names of the greats and the tyrants without making a distinction between them. ~ Aziz Hamza

The animals themselves are incapable of demanding their own liberation, or of protesting against their condition with votes, demonstrations, or bombs. Human beings have the power to continue to oppress other species forever, or until we make this planet unsuitable for living beings. Will our tyranny continue, proving that we really are the selfish tyrants that the most cynical of poets and philosophers have always said we are? Or will we rise to the challenge and prove our capacity for genuine altruism by ending our ruthless exploitation of the species in our power, not because we are forced to do so by rebels or terrorists, but because we recognize that our position is morally indefensible? The way in which we answer this question depends on the way in which each one of us, individually, answers it. ~ Peter Singer

Fear is a tyrant and a despot, more terrible than the rack, more potent than the snake. ~ Edgar Wallace

A hurt body and mind aren't just like a dictatorship; they are a dictatorship. There is no tyrant as merciless as pain, no despot so cruel as confusion. ~ Stephen King

The people must remain ever vigilant against tyrants masquerading as public servants. ~ George Washington

Who made man the exclusive judge, if woman partake with him the gift of reason?
In this style, argue tyrants of every denomination, from the weak king to the weak father of a family; they are all eager to crush reason; yet always assert that they usurp its throne only to be useful. ~ Mary Wollstonecraft

And that's the terrible thing about these past trials, is that they have this aura of legitimacy, this aura of legality. I suspect that better men than the world has known and more of them, have gone to their deaths through a legal system than through all the illegalities in the history of man.

Six million people in Europe during the Third Reich? Legal.

Sacco Vanzetti? Quite legal.

The Haymarket defendants? Legal.

The hundreds of rape trials throughout the South where black men were condemned to death? All legal.

Jesus? Legal.

Socrates? Legal.

And that is the kaleidoscopic nature of what we live through here and in other places. Because all tyrants learn that it is far better to do this thing through some semblance of legality than to do it without that pretense. ~ William M. Kunstler

No government which governs by the use of force can survive except by force. There is no going back because force begets force and the perpetrators of crimes live in fear that they might become victims in their turn. ~ Carlos Filipe Ximenes Belo

Harry! Don't you see? Voldemort himself created his worst enemy, just as tyrants everywhere do! Have you any idea how much tyrants fear the people they oppress? All of them realize that, one day, amongst their many victims, there is sure to be one who rises against them and strikes back! Voldemort ~ J.K. Rowling

Hold firm to your vision but don't be a tyrant on set, ~ Werner Herzog

I have long been convinced that the idea of liberty is abhorrent to most human beings. What they want is security, not freedom. Thus it seldom causes any public indignation when an enterprising tyrant claps down on one of his enemies. To most men it seems a natural proceeding. ~ H.L. Mencken

Perhaps the greatest consolation of the oppressed is to consider themselves superior to their tyrants. ~ Julien Green

Let tyrants shake their iron rod. ~ William Billings

But you can't kill me, Lord Tyrant. I represent that one thing you've never been able to kill, no matter how hard you try. I am hope. ~ Brandon Sanderson

Though it has no intrinsic value – you cannot eat or drink a dollar bill – trust in the dollar and in the wisdom of the Federal Reserve is so firm that it is shared even by Islamic fundamentalists, Mexican drug lords and North Korean tyrants. ~ Yuval Noah Harari

WEAKNESSES, n.pl. Certain primal powers of Tyrant Woman wherewith she holds dominion over the male of her species, binding him to the service of her will and paralyzing his rebellious energies. ~ Ambrose Bierce

Whether you have an abortion, what you put in your own body, with whom you have sex - these are not the affairs of the state. A government does not exist to control the citizens. When it does, it is a tyranny, and must be fought. The tree of liberty, Jefferson warned us, must be refreshed with the blood of tyrants and patriots. ~ Gore Vidal

Not as tyrants have we come, but as liberators. ~ Adolf Hitler

A public library is the most democratic thing in the world. What can be found there has undone dictators and tyrants: demagogues can persecute writers and tell them what to write as much as they like, but they cannot vanish what has been written in the past, though they try often enough ... People who love literature have at least part of their minds immune from indoctrination. If you read, you can learn to think for yourself. ~ Doris Lessing

[Norm said,] 'To all those who argue this war is a mistake, I'd like to point out that we've removed from power one of history's most ruthless and belligerent tyrants. A man who cold-bloodedly murdered thousands of his own people. Who built palaces for his personal pleasure while schools decayed and his country's health care system collapsed. Who maintained one of the world's most expensive armies while he allowed his nation's infrastructure to crumble. Who channeled resources to his cronies and political allies, allowing them to siphon off much of the country's wealth for their own personal gain. ~ Ben Fountain

I'm not helping you kill anybody else. It's just not happening. I'm done.""What makes you think you have a choice?""You know why? I'll tell you. Because we were just kissing in the street, and deep down, I don't believe you could actually blow up my house or kill my sister. I just don't, and she's probably not even in the house anymore anyway, so if you want to go in there and shoot somebody, fine, but you're on your own."Gobi paused, seeming to consider all of this. "What is it that you want to hear from me, Perry? Do you want me to tell you that these are bad people that I am killing tonight? Because they are. They are very bad people. They deserve to die, each and every one of them.""Nobody deserves to die.""Oh, really?""Okay, I mean, maybe people like Hitler and Pol Pot . . . dictators, tyrants, African warlords who starve their people into submission . . . but that guy at the bar wasn't an evil man.""How do you know? Because he had drinks with Hemingway?""I just know. ~ Joe Schreiber

Remember all men would be tyrants if they could - from a poem by Daniel Defoe, as written by Abigail to John Adams ~ David McCullough

A good deal of tyranny goes by the name of protection. ~ Crystal Eastman

Tyrants come and go, tyranny is constant. ~ Dick Francis

The tyrant custom, most grave senators,
Hath made the flinty and steel couch of war
My thrice-driven bed of down. ~ William Shakespeare

In a republic, that paradise of debility, the politician is a petty tyrant who obeys the laws. ~ Emile M. Cioran

Tyrants are but the spawn of Ignorance, Begotten by the slaves they trample on. ~ James Russell Lowell

Ronald Reagan said that he sought a Star Wars defense only in order to share the technology with the tyrants of the U.S.S.R. ~ Christopher Hitchens