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Tag Name "Despotism" (159)

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If the objects who serve us feel ecstacy, they are much more often concerned with themselves than with us, and our own enjoyment is consequently impaired. The idea of seeing another person experience the same pleasure reduces one to a kind of equality which spoils the unutterable charms that come from despotism.
Marquis de Sade
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Beauty is the greatest of human powers. Any power without counterbalance or control becomes autocratic and leads to abuse and to folly. Despotism in a government is insanity in woman, fantasy.
Honore de Balzac
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The supreme mystery of despotism, its prop and stay, is to keep men in a state of deception, and with the specious title of religion to cloak the fear by which they must be held in check, so that they will fight for their servitude as if for salvation.
Baruch Spinoza
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The steward, according to custom, had stopped all the clocks. This, in the language of Narouz, said Your stay with us is so brief, let us not be reminded of the flight of the hours.
Lawrence Durrell
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Beneath a free government there is nothing but the intelligence of the people to keep the people's peace. Order must be preserved, not by a military police or regiments of horse-guards, but by the spontaneous concert of a well-informed population, resolved that the rights which have been rescued from despotism shall not be subverted by anarchy.
Edward Everett
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William: I'm sure we can all pull together, sir. Vetinari: Oh, I do hope not. Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny. Free men pull in all kinds of directions.
Terry Pratchett
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My History of the Jesuits is in four volumes.... This society has been a greater calamity to mankind than the French Revolution, or Napoleon's despotism or ideology. It has obstructed progress of reformation and the improvement of the human mind in society much longer and more fatally.
John Adams
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I earnestly pray that the Omnipotent Being who has not deserted the cause of America in the hour of its extremest hazard, will never yield so fair a heritage of freedom a prey to 'Anarchy' or 'Despotism'.
George Washington
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When men have become heartily wearied of licentious anarchy, their eagerness has been proportionately great to embrace the opposite extreme of rigorous despotism.
Richard Whately
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Republics decline into democracies and democracies degenerate into despotisms.
Aristotle
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The doctrine of blind obedience and unqualified submission to any human power, whether civil or ecclesiastical, is the doctrine of despotism.
Angelina Grimke
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Throughout all the pain of enslavement and despotism, of inquisition, forced conversion, and massacre, the Jewish people has carried in its heart the yearning for freedom and has given this craving a folk expression which includes every soul in Israel, every single downtrodden pauperized soul!
Berl Katznelson
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This [the U.S. Constitution] is likely to be administered for a course of years and then end in despotism... when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic government, being incapable of any other.
Benjamin Franklin
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The faith in reason insists that the poverty of democracy offers a greater hope for mankind than the prosperity that attaches itself to aristocracy or despotism.
Bill Vaughan
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Any government, that is its own judge of, and determines authoritatively for the people, what are its own powers over the people, is an absolute government of course. It has all the powers that it chooses to exercise. There is no other or at least no more accurate definition of a despotism than this.
Lysander Spooner
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The moment you introduce a despotism in the world of thought, you succeed in making hypocrites - and you get in such a position that you never know what your neighbor thinks.
Robert Green Ingersoll
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No despotism is so formidable as that of a religion or a scientific system.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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Whatever crushes individuality is despotism, by whatever name it may be called and whether it professes to be enforcing the will of God or the injunctions of men.
John Stuart Mill
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Against us are all timid men who prefer the calm of despotism to the boisterous sea of liberty We are likely to preserve the liberty we have obtained only by unremitting labors and perils.
Thomas Jefferson
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The spirit of encroachment tends to consolidate the powers of all the departments in one, and thus to create whatever the form of government, a real despotism. A just estimate of that love of power, and proneness to abuse it, which predominates in the human heart is sufficient to satisfy us of the truth of this position.
George Washington
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We judge the Russians because they're living under despotism and we don't like it, but we've gotten into a fix now where we're living in a common predicament, and we ought to recognize this common predicament.
Reinhold Niebuhr
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The East knew and to the present day knows only that One is Free the Greek and the Roman world, that some are free the German World knows that All are free. The first political form therefore which we observe in History, is Despotism, the second Democracy and Aristocracy, the third, Monarchy.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
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Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Lord Acton
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The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it.
Thomas Jefferson
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