Tyranny Quotes

Virtue comes through contemplation of the divine, and the exercise of philosophy. But it also comes through public service. The one is incomplete without the other. Power without wisdom is tyranny; wisdom without power is pointless.

Tyrants have not yet discovered any chains that can fetter the mind.

With chilling care, my hardshipshave managed to implant a spiritof recklessness within me,one that impels me to point out injustice and wrongdoing.So, while many strive to have a toil free life, I spend my time criticizing tyrants,and so the spirit of subversion was quickly established within me. Now all I can do is calmly wait for cold death to seize me.

The foremost, or indeed the sole condition, which is required in order to succeed in centralizing the supreme power in a democratic community, is to love equality, or to get men to believe you love it. Thus, the science of despotism, which was once so complex, is simplified, and reduced, as it were, to a single principle.

Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of production and trade...

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

By exiling human judgment in the last few decades, modern law changed role from useful tool to brainless tyrant. This legal regime will never be up to the job, any more than the Soviet system of central planning was, because ti can't think. The comedy of law's sterile logic--large POISON signs warning against common sand, spending twenty-two years on pesticide review and deciding next to nothing, allowing fifty-year-old white men to sue for discrimination--is all too reminiscent of the old jokes we used to hear about life in the Eastern bloc. Judgement is to law as water is to crops. It should not be surprising that law has become brittle, and society along with it.

Just as terror, even in its pre-total, merely tyrannical form ruins all relationships between men, so the self-compulsion of ideological thinking ruins all relationships with reality. The preparation has succeeded when people have lost contact with their fellow men as well as the reality around them; for together with these contacts, men lose the capacity of both experience and thought. The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.

Laughter is an anarchic blasphemy. Tyrants are wise to fear it.

To stop oppression, you will first end the tyranny of the oppressors.

At the time I could not see beyond the moral dilemma that is presented to the weak in a world governed by the strong: Break the rules, or perish.

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

Men do not become tyrants in order that they may not suffer cold.

Augustus was sensible that mankind is governed by names; nor was he deceived in his expectation, that the senate and the people would submit to slavery, provided they were respectfully assured that they still enjoyed their ancient freedoms.

He who wishes to be obeyed must know how to command

Liberation from the tyranny of the body contributes to greatness, but just as much to greatness in sin as to greatness in virtue.

The Unexpected GiftTorn asunder from her slumberin the hour of half past threeThe child knew the tyrannical regimeand followed instinctively.-(slice from Enigmatic Evolution)

The means of defence agst. foreign danger, have been always the instruments of tyranny at home.

We live in an age of equivocal competency: if you want, you can be a competent dictator, a competent self-promoter, a competent terrorist. Just because you can do something well does not mean you should be doing it.

Irony: Taking a 170-year-old envy-based "philosophy," which has led to the murder of several hundred million human beings and the oppression of billions more, and calling it "progressive".

Of all the tyrannies that affect mankind, tyranny in religion is the worst; every other species of tyranny is limited to the world we live in; but this attempts to stride beyond the grave, and seeks to pursue us into eternity.

The welfare state is the oldest con game in the world. First you take people's money away quietly and then you give some of it back to them flamboyantly.

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.

Hurricanes couldn’t remove you from my mind. You’re my world and I’m incapable of not loving you.

BLOODY LIPSThe bloody woundOf the gladiatorGurgles out life's end.The cries of acclimations from the standsFill the sky with raging tigers.Waving their arms about to incite the massesThe aging notables add an air of dignity to the arena.Making their separate entriestheyKNEELover the still-warm corpsesOf the young. Their withered lips they poseUpon the fresh flowing woundsAnd, to prolong their lives – so they believe,Suck, ravenously suck out the blood, blood, blood.Fresh blood from the sunFlowing into filthy veinsAs into sewage pipes,And thus the Heart of the Nation is abandoned.

Secular ideologies preach liberty but practice tyranny.

In this confusion we begin to see what lies behind John Paul II's startling warning about democracy "effectively mov[ing] towards a form of totalitarianism." It begins to happen at a practical level when we simultaneously hold that rights which arise from the dignity of the person are also a matter of "bargaining." New rights can be claimed or created, and whatever privileges can be negotiated around them are then secured by reference to human dignity, even when these new rights are directly contrary to the human dignity of some, for example, the unborn or the elderly sick. This confusion about the nature of rights debases their currency and undermines the first principles of democracy. Such freedom gradually becomes a tyrannical "freedom of the 'the strong' against the weak, who have no choice but to submit.

At the end of a century that has seenthe evils of communism, Nazism and other modern tyrannies,the impulse to centralize power remains amazingly persistent.

It is blasphemy to call tyrants and oppressors, God’s ministers. They are more properly the messengers of Satan to buffet us. No rulers are properly God’s ministers, but such as are just, ruling in the fear of God

The only way to ensure democracy functions correctly is to question its governance constantly. Fail to do so and you may awake to find yourself living in a police state.

Withholding information is the essence of tyranny. Control of the flow of information is the tool of the dictatorship.

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

Implicit … in the very idea of ordered liberty, was a rejection of absolute truth, the infallibility of any idea or ideology or theology or “ism,” any tyrannical consistency that might lock future generations into a single, unalterable course, or drive both majorities and minorities into the cruelties of the Inquisition, the pogrom, the gulag, or the jihad....A rejection of absolutism, in all its forms, may sometimes slip into moral relativism or even nihilism, an erosion of values that hold society together…

... how terrible is the pain of the mind and heart when the freedom of mankind is suppressed!

... [T]he other lesson history has taught us - that tyranny and oppression are no match for compassion ... that the fanatical shouts of the bullies of the world are invariably silenced by the unified voices of decency that rise up to meet them.

Those who don't know history are destined to be tyrannized by it

There are always a few, Claire, who like being told what to do instead of being required to think. And those are the ones you should fear. That goes equally for humans, I'm afraid. Critical thinking has become a sadly rare skill these days.

Just because he was not a monster did not mean he wouldn’t be treated as one.

In 1870, came the victory of the short-service troops of Prussia over the long-service troops of France, where conscription had but recently been reintroduced in a partial form and as a supplementary measure. That obvious contrast carried more weight into the world than all the other factors which tilted the scales against France. As a result, universal peace-time conscription was adopted by almost all countries as the basis of their military system. This ensured that wars would grow bigger in scale, longer in duration, and worse in effects. While conscription appeared democratic, it provided autocrats, hereditary or revolutionary, with more effective and comprehensive means of imposing their will, both in peace and war. Once the rulp of compulsory service in arms was established for the young men of a nation, it was an obvious and easy transition to the servitude of the whole population. Totalitarian tyranny is the twin of total warfare—which might aptly be termed a reversion to tribal warfare on a larger scale.

Enclosed within the tyranny of our minds and there is where we are lost.