Tyrants Quotes - Page 14

Human beings today are surrounded by huge institutions we can never penetrate: the City, the banking system, political and advertising conglomerates, vast entertainment enterprises. They've made themselves user friendly, but they define the tastes to which we conform. They're rather subtle, subservient tyrants, but no less sinister for that.

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.

Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion.

I would rather deal with a tyrant any day than a committee. Committees, as a general rule, aren’t willing to take chances, which is why you have a committee in the first place — so you can share the blame.

That cruelest of tyrants - public opinion.

A collective tyrant, spread over the length and breadth of the land, is no more acceptable than a single tyrant ensconced on his throne.

Everywhere that freedom stirs, let tyrants fear.

Tyrants are seldom free; the cares and the instruments of their tyranny enslave them.

... one of the things the tyrant most cunningly engineers is the gross over-simplification of language, because propaganda requires that the minds of the collective respond primitively to slogans of incitement.

Spineless politics do not change the mind of a tyrant.

The tyrant grinds down his slaves and they don't turn against him, they crush those beneath them.

My dad was a tyrant. He used to physically beat the crap out of us.

Nature has left this tincture in the blood, That all men would be tyrants if they could.

Only a humorless tyrant could want a perpetual chanting of praises that, one has no choice but to assume, would be the innate virtues and splendors furnished him by his creator, infinite regression, drowned in praise!

In the west, Apollo and Dionysus strive for victory. Apollo makes the boundary lines that are civilization but that lead to convention, constraint, oppression. Dionysus is energy unbound, mad, callous, destructive, wasteful. Apollo is law, history, tradition, the dignity and safety of custom and form. Dionysus is the new, exhilarating but rude, sweeping all away to begin again. Apollo is a tyrant, Dionysus is a vandal.

L'arbre de la liberté croît lorsqu'il est arrosé du sang de toute espèce de tyrans (The tree of liberty grows only when watered by the blood of tyrants).

Republics end through luxury; monarchies through poverty.

[Magna Carta provided] "a system of checks and balances which would accord the monarchy its necessary strength, but would prevent its perversion by a tyrant or a fool.

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

Tis time to fear when tyrants seem to kiss.

So long as war is the main business of nations, temporary despotism - despotism during the campaign - is indispensable.

Our nation and those of the developed world must offer our own resistance to despot leaders who seek to commit murder on the basis of religion or race.

O ye that love mankind! Ye that dare oppose, not only the tyranny, but the tyrant, stand forth! Every spot of the old world is overrun with oppression. Freedom hath been hunted round the globe. Asia, and Africa, have long expelled her. Europe regards her like a stranger, and England hath given her warning to depart. O! receive the fugitive, and prepare in time an asylum for mankind.

Most of the nations around the world are led by tyrants and dictators and thugs who are leading their countries for one reason.

Whether or not patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel, national security can be the last refuge of the tyrant.