Famous Tyranny Quotations

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"I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man."
by Thomas Jefferson
"One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny."
by Bertrand Russell
"Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate."
by Bertrand Russell
"There are few minds to which tyranny is not delightful."
by Samuel Johnson
"There is a secret pride in every human heart that revolts at tyranny. You may order and drive an individual, but you cannot make him respect you."
by William Hazlitt
"Tyranny destroys or strengthens the individual; freedom enervates him, until he becomes no more than a puppet. Man has more chances of saving himself by hell than by paradise."
by E. M. Cioran
"When you look at organized religion of whatever sort whether it's Christianity in all its variants, or whether it's Islam or some forms of extreme Hinduism wherever you see organized religion and priesthoods and power, you see cruelty and tyranny and repression. It's almost a universal law."
by Philip Pullman
"Dictatorship naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme liberty."
by Tyranny
"Despots play their part in the works of thinkers. Fettered words are terrible words. The writer doubles and trebles the power of his writing when a ruler imposes silence on the people. Something emerges from that enforced silence, a mysterious fullness which filters through and becomes steely in the thought. Repression in history leads to conciseness in the historian, and the rocklike hardness of much celebrated prose is due to the tempering of the tyrant."
by Victor Hugo
"It is the American vice, the democratic disease which expresses its tyranny by reducing everything unique to the level of the herd."
by Henry Miller
"Like Cato, give his little senate laws, and sit attentive to his own applause."
by Alexander Pope
"No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets."
by Edward Abbey
"Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear."
by Harry S Truman
"One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution in order to establish a dictatorship."
by George Orwell
"In every tyrant's heart there springs in the end this poison, that he cannot trust a friend."
by Aeschylus
"I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man."
by Thomas Jefferson
"Death is softer by far than tyranny."
by Aeschylus
"From behind the Iron Curtain, there are signs that tyranny is in trouble and reminders that its structure is as brittle as its surface is hard."
by Dwight D Eisenhower
".... You ask, What is our policy? I will say; 'It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us: to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy.' You ask, What is our aim? I can answer with one word: Victory - victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival."
by Sir Winston Churchill
"A good deal of tyranny goes by the name of protection."
by Crystal Eastman
"A modern democracy is a tyranny whose borders are undefined; one discovers how far one can go only by traveling in a straight line until one is stopped."
by Norman Mailer
"All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent."
by Thomas Jefferson
"America is just the country that shows how all the written guarantees in the world for freedom are no protection against tyranny and oppression of the worst kind. There the politician has come to be looked upon as the very scum of society."
by Peter Kropotkin
"Any appeasement of tyranny is treason to this republic and to the democratic ideal."
by William Allen White
"Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny."
by Edmund Burke
"Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny"
by Edmund Burke
"Bad law is the worst sort of tyranny."
by Edmund Burke
"Babylon violated diminishes Alexander; Rome enslaved diminishes Caesar; massacred Jerusalem diminishes Titus. Tyranny follows the tyrant. Woe to the man who leaves behind a shadow that bears his form."
by Victor Hugo
"Beauty is a short-lived tyranny."
by George Bernard Shaw
"Beauty is a short-lived tyranny"
by Socrates
"Certainly one of the chief guarantees of freedom under any government, no matter how popular and respected, is the right of the citizens to keep and bear arms. This is not to say that firearms should not be carefully used and that definite safety rules of precaution should not be taught and enforced. But the right of the citizens to bear arms is just one guarantee against arbitrary government and one more safeguard against a tyranny which now appears remote in America, but which historically has proved to be always possible."
by Hubert Humphrey
"Death is better, a milder fate than tyranny."
by Aeschylus
"Enlighten the people, generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like spirits at the dawn of day."
by Thomas Jefferson
"Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day."
by Thomas Jefferson
"Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny."
by Thomas Jefferson
"For somehow this disease inheres in tyranny, never to trust one's friends."
by Aeschylus
"Fragile as reason is and limited as law is as the institutionalised medium of reason, that's all we have between us and the tyranny of mere will and the cruelty of unbridled, undisciplined feelings."
by Felix Frankfurter
"Great minds are to make others great. Their superiority is to be used, not to break the multitude to intellectual vassalage, not to establish over them a spiritual tyranny, but to rouse them from lethargy, and to aidthem to judge for themselves."
by William Ellery Channing
"He mobilized the English language and sent it into battle to steady his fellow countrymen and hearten those Europeans upon whom the long dark night of tyranny had descended."
by Edward R. Murrow
"I believe that God has planted in every human heart the desire to live in freedom. And even when that desire is crushed by tyranny for decades, it will rise again."
by George W. Bush
"I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man"
by Thomas Jefferson
"If people let government decide what foods they eat and what medicines they take, their bodies will soon be in as sorry a state as are the souls of those who live under tyranny."
by Thomas Jefferson
"If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy"
by James Madison
"If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy."
by James Madison
"It is a besetting vice of democracies to substitute public opinion for law. This is the usual form in which masses of men exhibit their tyranny."
by James Fenimore Cooper
"It has been observed that a pure democracy if it were practicable would be the most perfect government. Experience has proved that no position is more false than this. The ancient democracies in which the people themselves deliberated never possessed one good feature of government. Their very character was tyranny; their figure deformity."
by Alexander Hamilton
"It has been observed that a pure democracy if it were practicable would be the most perfect government. Experience has proved that no position is more false than this. The ancient democracies in which the people themselves deliberated never possessed one good feature of government. Their very character was tyranny their figure deformity."
by Alexander Hamilton
"Make no mistake about it: Operation Desert Storm truly was a victory of good over evil, of freedom over tyranny, of peace over war."
by Dan Quayle
"No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets."
by Edward Abbey
"Of all human ills, greatest is fortune's wayward tyranny."
by Sophocles
"Of all forms of tyranny the least attractive and the most vulgar is the tyranny of mere wealth, the tyranny of plutocracy."
by Theodore Roosevelt
"Of all tyrannies a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
by Clive Staples Lewis
"One should as a rule respect public opinion in so far as is necessary to avoid starvation and to keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny, and is likely to interfere with happiness in all kinds of ways."
by Bertrand Russell
"Power in defense of freedom is greater than power on behalf of tyranny and oppression."
by Malcolm X
"Socrates called beauty a short-lived tyranny; Plato, a privilege of nature; Theophrastus, a silent cheat; Theocritus, a delightful prejudice; Carneades, a solitary kingdom; Aristotle, that it was better than all the letters of recommendation in the world; Homer, that it was a glorious gift of nature; and Ovid, that it was favor bestowed by the gods."
by Francis Quarles
"Taxation without representation is tyranny."
by James Otis
"The best government is a benevolent tyranny tempered by an occasional assassination."
by Voltaire
"The function of music is to release us from the tyranny of conscious thought."
by Sir Thomas Beecham
"The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home"
by James Madison
"The same state of the passions which fits the multitude, who have not sufficient stock of reason and knowledge to guide them, for opposition to tyranny and oppression, very naturally leads them to a contempt and disregard of all authority."
by Alexander Hamilton
"The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government."
by Thomas Jefferson
"The thin and precarious crust of decency is all that separates any civilization, however impressive, from the hell of anarchy or systematic tyranny which lie in wait beneath the surface."
by Aldous Huxley
"The tyranny of a multitude is a multiplied tyranny."
by Edmund Burke
"There is no crueler tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of law and in the name of justice."
by Montesquieu
"There will always be a part, and always a very large part of every community, that have no care but for themselves, and whose care for themselves reaches little further than impatience of immediate pain, and eagerness for the nearest good."
by Samuel Johnson
"To give pain is the tyranny; to make happy, the true empire of beauty."
by Samuel Butler
"Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think."
by Hannah Arendt
"Under conditions of tyranny it is far easer to act than to think."
by Hanna Arendt
"Tyrants are seldom free; the cares and the instruments of their tyranny enslave them."
by George Santayana
"Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph."
by Thomas Paine
"Tyranny naturally arises out of democracy."
by Plato
"Tyranny cannot defeat the power of ideas."
by Helen Keller
"Whenever is found what is called a paternal government, there is found state education. It has been discovered that the best way to ensure implicit obedience is to commence tyranny in the nursery."
by Benjamin Disraeli
"These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly; it is dearness only that gives everything its value. I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress and grow brave by reflection. 'Tis the business of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death."
by Thomas Paine
"I refer to the tyranny of science. The old horrors are being brought back. Though we no longer torture in the name of God or in the name of the State, we torture in the name of science!"
by John Cowper Powys
"Let us not think that [vegetarianism] is the end in itself. It is a means only to an end, and we must not be content to be vegetarians only. The end is the civilisation of the universal feeling of brotherhood, on which it rests, not towards animals only, but towards all men . . . our treatment of our fellow-humans is largely reflected from our behaviour towards the sub-human races. As long as our ethics in this matter are based on barbaric cruelty and selfish tyranny it will forever be well-nigh impossible to attain a high and just social morality."
by Ernest Bell
"Now what is it moves our very heart and sickens us so much as cruelty shown to poor brutes? I suppose this: first, that they have done us no harm; next, that they have no power whatever of resistance; it is the cowardice and tyranny of which they are the victims which make their sufferings so especially touching. … There is something so dreadful, so Satanic, in tormenting those who have never harmed us, and who cannot defend themselves, who are utterly in our power."
by Cardinal John Henry Newman
"The day may come when the rest of animal creation may acquire those rights which could never have been withheld from them but by the hand of tyranny...a full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal, than an infant of a day, or a week or even a month old. But suppose the case were otherwise, what would it avail? The question is not, can they reason? Nor can they talk? But can they suffer? Why should the law refuse its protection to any sensitive being? The time will come when humanity will extend its mantle over everything which breathes."
by Jeremy Bentham
"A primary function of art and thought is to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture in the environmental sense and to permit him to stand beyond it in an autonomy of perception and judgment."
by Lionel Trilling
"The one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the majority."
by Lord (John Emerich Edward Dalberg) Acton
"Then hail! thou noble conqueror! That, when tyranny oppressed, hewed for our fathers from the wild. A land wherein to rest."
by Mary Elizabeth Hewitt
"One should respect public opinion in so far as is necessary to avoid starvation and to keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny."
by Bertrand Russell
"You see, you all start with the premise that democracy is some good. I don't think it's worth a damn. I think Churchill is right, the only thing to be said for democracy is that there is nothing else that's any better, and therefore he used to say, Tyranny tempered by assassination, but lots of assassination. People say, If the Congress were more representative of the people it would be better. I say the Congress is too damn representative. It's just as stupid as the people are; just as uneducated, just as dumb, just as selfish. You know the Congress is a perfect example, and created to be a perfect example."
by Dean Acheson
"In a healthy nation there is a kind of dramatic balance between the will of the people and the government, which prevents its degeneration into tyranny."
by Albert Einstein
"Bad laws are the worst form of tyranny."
by Edmund Burke
"There are three things in the world that deserve no mercy, hypocrisy, fraud, and tyranny."
by Frederick William Robertson
"Beware the tyranny of the minority."
by Proverb
"The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the iniquities of the selfish, and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who in the name of charity and goodwill shepards the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brothers keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger, those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know my name is the LORD, when I lay my vengeance upon thee!"
by Pulp Fiction (Partly from Ezekiel 25:17)
"You see how this House of Commons has begun to verify all the ill prophecies that were made of it -- low, vulgar, meddling with everything, assuming universal competency, and flattering every base passion -- and sneering at everything noble refined and truly national. The direct tyranny will come on by and by, after it shall have gratified the multitude with the spoil and ruin of the old institutions of the land."
by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
"Temperament lies behind mood; behind will, lies the fate of character. Then behind both, the influence of family the tyranny of culture; and finally the power of climate and environment; and we are free, only to the extent we rise above these."
by John Burroughs
"The first who attracts the eye, the first in enlightenment, in power and in happiness, is the white man, the European, man par excellence; below him appear the Negro and the Indian. These two unfortunate races have neither birth, nor face, nor language, nor mores in common; only their misfortunes look alike. Both occupy an equally inferior position in the country that they inhabit; both experience the effects of tyranny; and if their miseries are different, they can accuse the same author for them."
by Alexis de Tocqueville
"No cause is left but the most ancient of all, the one, in fact, that from the beginning of our history has determined the very existence of politics, the cause of freedom versus tyranny."
by Hannah Arendt
"The clergy believe that any portion of power confided to me will be exerted in opposition to their schemes. And they believe rightly; for I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against any form of tyranny known to the mind of man."
by Thomas Jefferson
"Revolutions have never lightened the burden of tyranny: they have only shifted it to another shoulder."
by George Bernard Shaw
"Sexism is the foundation on which all tyranny is built. Every social form of hierarchy and abuse is modeled on male-over-female domination."
by Andrea Dworkin
"Any unity which doesn't have its origin in the multitudes is tyranny."
by Blaise Pascal
"With society and its public, there is no longer any other language than that of bombs, barricades, and all that follows."
by Antonin Artaud
"Tyranny is yielding to the lust of the governing."
by Lord Moulton
"Tyranny is always better organized than freedom."
by Charles Peguy
"Tyranny and anarchy are never far apart."
by Jeremy Bentham


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