Discover the most popular and inspiring quotes and sayings on the topic of Despotism. Share them with your friends on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, and let the world be inspired by their powerful messages. Here are the Top 100 Despotism Quotes And Sayings by 93 Authors including Archibald Macleish,Samuel Williams,Juvenal,Thomas Paine,Abraham Lincoln for you to enjoy and share.
The infantile cowardice of our time which demands an external pattern, a nonhuman authority.
In a despotic government, the only principle by which the tyrant who is to move the whole machine means to regulate and manage the people is fear, by the servile dread of his power. But a free government, which of all others is far the most preferable, cannot be supported without virtue.
Led on by impulse, and blind and ungovernable desires.
The strength and power of despotism consists wholly in the fear of resistance.
When the white man governs himself, that is self-government; but when he governs himself and also governs another man, that is more than self-government - that is despotism.
When arrogant hands once seize power, the ruler thinks authority resides in stubbornness.
A nation ignorant of the equal benefits of liberty and law, must be awed by the flashes of arbitrary power: the cruelty of a despot will assume the character of justice; his profusion, of liberality; his obstinacy, of firmness.
The nation which will not adopt an equilibrium of power must adopt a despotism. There is no other alternative.
Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism.
When men have become heartily wearied of licentious anarchy, their eagerness has been proportionately great to embrace the opposite extreme of rigorous despotism.
When freedom does not have a purpose, when it does not wish to know anything about the rule of law engraved in the hearts of men and women, when it does not listen to the voice of conscience, it turns against humanity and society.
absolute power is corrupting
Power rises to the top like cream and dominates the weak with cruelty disguised as
and often even believed to be
benevolence.
One's love for despotism is in exact proportion to one's contempt for one's country.
By 1776 the American revolutionaries had defined "despotism" down to the level of taxing tea and quartering soldiers. At
To commit violent and unjust acts, it is not enough for a government to have the will or even the power; the habits, ideas and passions of the time must lend themselves to their committal.
being an only child - you grow up knowing you aren't allowed to disappoint, you're not even allowed to die. There isn't a replacement toddling around; you're it. It makes you desperate to be flawless, and it also makes you drunk with the power. In such ways are despots made.
Every State is a despotism, be the despot one or many.
Rulers who destroy men's freedom commonly begin by trying to retain its forms ... They cherish the illusion that they can combine the prerogatives of absolute power with the moral authority that comes from popular assent.
The powerful and the powerless.
The fatal poison of irresponsible power.
Despotism is the only form of government which may with safety to itself, neglect the education of its infant poor.
Fear above all, capricious authority.
Resolved to ruin or to rule the state.
That a thirst for absolute power is the natural disease of monarchy.
Despotism has so often been established in the name of liberty that experience should warn us to judge parties by their practices rather than their preachings.
The public is despotic in its temper; it is capable of denying common justice when too strenuously demanded as a right; but quite as frequently it awards more than justice, when the appeal is made, as despots love to have it made, entirely to its generosity.
What power have you got? Where did you get it from? In whose interests do you exercise it? To whom are you accountable? And how can we get rid of you
Religions are the cradles of despotism.
Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.
Wealth held by a class and used ambitiously becomes as despotic as an absolute monarchy, and has in its hands manners, customs, laws, institutions, and governments themselves.
No matter how noble the original intentions, the seductions of power can turn any movement from one seeking equal rights to one that would deny them to others.
Ambition is the immoderate desire for power.
Tyrants are seldom free; the cares and the instruments of their tyranny enslave them.
Tyranny is like the electric wiring in an old house. A tyrant dies, the new tyrant takes possession, and all he has to do is drop the switch.
Power, money, lusts of the flesh and any other desire which takes a man, a family, a village or a nation from peace or freedom and places it under the sword is tyranny and the enemy of all.
We are ruled by chance but never have enough patience to accept its despotism.
After many unhappy experiments in the direction of an ideal Republic, it was found that what may be described as a Despotism tempered by Dynamite provides, on the whole, the most satisfactory description of ruler - an autocrat who dares not abuse his autocratic power.
It is a false and dangerous situation which bases public power on private want, and roots the grandeur of the State in the suffering of the individual. It is a badly constituted grandeur which combines all the material elements, and into which no moral element enters.
Absolute power corrupts even when exercised for humane purposes. The benevolent despot who sees himself as a shepherd of the people still demands from others the submissiveness of sheep. The taint inherent in absolute power is not its inhumanity but its anti-humanity.
Minds altogether horrible in their power, and in their ignorance - which their power protected.
Two forms of government are favorable to the prevalence of falsehood and deceit. Under a Despotism, men are false, treacherous, and deceitful through fear, like slaves dreading the lash. Under a Democracy they are so as a means of attaining popularity and office, and because of the greed for wealth.
A democratic despotism is like a theocracy: it assumes its own correctness.
The hand entrusted with power becomes, either from human depravity or esprit de corps, the necessary enemy of the people
To begin with unlimited freedom is to end with unlimited despotism.
For 73 years a totalitarian regime ruled the country. Totalitarian regime.
When the sense of justice seeks to express itself quite outside the regular channels of established government, it has set forth on a dangerous journey inevitably ending in disaster ...
In times of anarchy one may seem a despot in order to be a saviour.
Other offences, even the greatest, are the violation of one law: despotism is the violation of all.
If it's a despot you would dethrone, see first that his throne erected within you is destroyed.
The terrible tyranny of the majority.
The arts of power and its minions are the same in all countries and in all ages. It marks its victim; denounces it; and excites the public odium and the public hatred, to conceal its own abuses and encroachments.
Idealism is the despot of thought, just as politics is the despot of will.
The despotism of will in ideas is styled plan, project, character, obstinacy; its despotism in desires is called passion.
Ambition. An overmastering desire to be vilified by enemies while living and made ridiculous by friends when dead.
The desire to rule over others, the will to power, is one of the greatest crimes that man has committed.
Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms, those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny; and it is believed that the most effectual means of preventing this would be, to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large ...
Threads of power and domination a palimpsest of greed
The desire to achieve grand utopian plans often poses a grave threat to freedom
Whenever justice is uncertain and police spying and terror are at work, human beings fall into isolation, which, of course, is the aim and purpose of the dictator state, since it is based on the greatest possible accumulation of depotentiated social units.
Even the most despotic government cannot stand except for the consent of the governed ... Immediately the subject ceases to fear the despotic force, his power is gone.
I wish I was a despot that I might save the noble, the beautiful trees that are daily falling sacrifice to the cupidity of their owners, or the necessity of the poor. The unnecessary felling of a tree, perhaps the growth of centuries, seems to me a crime little short of murder.
lust, greed, desire, and supremacy;
In this denial of the right to participate in government, not merely the degradation of woman and the perpetuation of a great injustice happens, but the maiming and repudiation of one-half of the moral and intellectual power of the government of the world.
The person who takes power will never be happy with those things they gain. They have lost their essential balance and innocence. And without innocence, nothing can further, as they say in the I Ching.
to bring about the downfall of
Those who desire power want to
Everybody wants power. Power in some form or other. [ ... ] Some people want power to persecute other human beings; you expend your lust for power in persecuting words, twisting them, molding them, torturing them to obey you.
Tyrants preserve themselves by sowing fear and mistrust among the citizens by means of spies, by distracting them with foreign wars, by eliminating men of spirit who might lead a revolution, by humbling the people, and making them incapable of decisive action ...
Power corrupts on an equal-opportunity basis.
The only justification for repressive institutions is material and cultural deficit. But such institutions, at certain stages of history, perpetuate and produce such a deficit, and even threaten human survival.
To rule by knowledge ravages the country.
There are times when a nation desires a king or a dictator; times of confusion and uncertainty when they go down on their knees to one man and beg him to accept absolute power over them.
It is odd to consider the connection between despotism and barbarity, and how the making one person more than man makes the rest less.
You can rule ignorance; you can manipulate the illiterate; you can do whatever you want when a people are uneducated, so that goes in line with corrupt business and corrupt politics.
Timid and cowardly soldiers cause the loss of a nation's independence; but pusillanimous magistrates destroy the empire of the laws, the rights of the throne, and even social order itself.
Vanity and pride of nations; vanity is as advantageous to a government as pride is dangerous.
Disobedience- that is the nobility of slaves.
Dominance. Control. These things the unjust seek most of all. And so it is the duty of the just to defy dominance and to challenge control.
The totalitarian phenomenon is not to be understood without making an allowance for the thesis that some important part of every society consists of people who actively want tyranny: either to exercise it themselves or - much more mysteriously - to submit to it.
Wealth is attended with power, by which bargains and proceedings, contrary to universal righteousness, are supported; and hence oppression, carried on with worldly policy and order, clothes itself with the name of justice and becomes like a seed of discord in the soul.
In a free country there is much clamor, with little suffering; in a despotic state there is little complaint, with much grievance.
P57- the oppressors, whose tranquility rests on how well people fit the world the oppressors have created, and how little they question it.
To understand why dictators have a problem with making peace - or at least a genuine peace - the link between the nature of a regime and its external behavior must be understood.
Happiness without power, wages without work, a home without frontiers, religion without myth. These characteristics are hated by the rulers because the ruled secretly long to possess them. The rulers are only safe as long as the people they rule turn their longed-for goals into hated forms of evil.
A corruption of intentions.
A country governed by a despot is an inverted cone.
It is the old practice of despots to use a part of the people to keep the rest in order.
Democracy, frequently defined as Individual greed, moderated by an efficient but not too zealous government.
Whatever government is not a government of laws, is a despotism, let it be called what it may.
Degeneracy follows every autocratic system of violence, for violence inevitably attracts moral inferiors. Time has proven that illustrious tyrants are succeeded by scoundrels.
The cruelties of property and privilege are always more ferocious than the revenges of poverty and oppression. For the one aims at perpetuating resented injustice, the other is merely a momentary passion soon appeased.
Those who lack the capacity to achieve much in an atmosphere of freedom will clamor for power.
A leader, who divides his own people, contaminates his platform and begins to destroy his own territory.
To enslave a people, give them money they didn't earn.
Power, when invested in the hands of knaves or fools, generally is the source of tyranny ...
Presented with a challenge to its power, an illegitimate regime will often overreact, driven by the knowledge that all they have is force.
Extremists, who thrive on conflict; who do not tolerate diversity; who seek power through division and destruction. The global system they hope to create is one of new walls and new isolation, and radically smaller horizons. It is an anti-democratic, anti-economic-growth, and anti-progress agenda.
People unfit for freedom - who cannot do much with it - are hungry for power. The desire for freedom is an attribute of a "have" type of self. It says: leave me alone and I shall grow, learn, and realize my capacities. The desire for power is basically an attribute of a "have not" type of self.
Real power is achieved when the ruling class controls the material essentials of life, granting and withholding them from the masses as if they were privileges.