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Tag Name "Despotism" (159)

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Europeans have sometimes been beguiled by a despotism that comes concealed in the seductive form of an ideal – as it did in the cases of Hitler and Stalin. This fact may remind us that the possibility of despotism is remote neither in space nor in time.
Kenneth Minogue
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He asks how the evil is to be remedied. I tell him that there seems to be little chance for avoiding the extremes of despotism or anarchy that the only ground of hope must be the morals of the people, but that these are, I fear, too corrupt.
Gouverneur Morris
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I am entirely persuaded that the agitations of the public mind advance its powers, and that at every vibration between the points of liberty and despotism, something will be gained for the former. As men become better informed, their rulers must respect them the more.
Thomas Jefferson
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Are the peoples of the Middle East somehow beyond the reach of liberty? Are millions of men and women and children condemned by history or culture to live in despotism? Are they alone never to know freedom and never even to have a choice in the matter?
George W. Bush
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Not mythical material productive forces, but reason and ideas determine the course of human affairs. What is needed to stop the trend toward socialism and despotism is common-sense and moral courage.
Ludwig von Mises
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Small natures require despotism to exercise their sinews, as great souls thirst for equality to give play to their heart.
Honore de Balzac
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Creativity doesn't flourish in an atmosphere of despotism, coercion and fear.
P. D. James
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Democracy has two excesses to avoid: the spirit of inequality, which leads to an aristocracy, or to the government of a single individual and the spirit of extreme equality, which conducts it to despotism, as the despotism of a single individual finishes by conquest.
Baron de Montesquieu
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Socialism easily accepts despotism. It requires the strongest execution of power -- power sufficient to interfere with property.
Lord Acton
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It seems that the inevitable fate of man is never attain complete freedom: princes everywhere tend to despotism and the people to servitude.
Jean-Paul Marat
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It is always observable that the physical and the exact sciences are the last to suffer under despotisms.
Richard Henry Dana, Jr.
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The strength and power of despotism consists wholly in the fear of resistance.
Thomas Paine
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A court which yields to the popular will thereby licenses itself to practice despotism, for there can be no assurance that it will not, on another occasion, indulge its own will.
Felix Frankfurter
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Absolute power turns its possessors not into a God but an anti-God. For God turned clay into men, while the absolute despot turns men into clay.
Eric Hoffer
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Arbitrary power is but the first natural step from anarchy, or the savage life.
Jonathan Swift
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An elective despotism was not the government we fought for, but one which should not only be founded on true free principles, but in which the powers of government should be so divided and balanced among general bodies of magistracy, as that no one could transcend their legal limits without being effectually checked and restrained by the others.
Thomas Jefferson
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The flames kindled on the Fourth of July, 1776, have spread over too much of the globe to be extinguished by the feeble engines of despotism on the contrary, they will consume these engines and all who work them.
Thomas Jefferson
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You do not know the unfathomable cowardice of humanity...servile in the face of force, pitiless in the face of weakness, implacable before blunders, indulgent before crimes...and patient to the point of martyrdom before all the violences of bold despotism.
Niccolo Machiavelli
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But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
Thomas Jefferson
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[the framers of the Constitution] intended our government should be a republic, which differs more widely from a democracy than a democracy from a despotism.
Fisher Ames
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[ Alexis de] Tocqueville said it in 1835, and it's as true today as it was then: 'Despotism may govern without faith, but liberty cannot. Religion is more needed in democratic societies than in any other.'
Paul Kengor
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Man is about the same, in the main, whether with despotism, or whether with freedom.
Walt Whitman
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Military despotism represses generous sentiments, priestly tyranny stifles them.
Napoleon Bonaparte
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The 'survival of the fittest' is beneficently inevitable the capitalist is powerless against labor, unless the State . . . steps in, and helps him catch and fleece his victims. The old plea of despotism, that liberty is unsafe, reappears now in the mistaken notion that competition is hostile to labor.
Ezra Heywood
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