Quotes About Tyranny

You may talk of the tyranny of Nero and Tiberius; but the real tyranny is the tyranny of your next-door neighbor.

In more than half the nations of our world, torture certifies that the form of government is tyranny. Only tyranny, no matter how camouflaged, needs and employs torturers. Torture has no ideology.

In action, in desire, we must submit perpetually to the tyranny of outside forces; but in thought, in aspiration, we are free, free from our fellowmen, free from the petty planet on which our bodies impotently crawl, free even, while we live, from the tyranny of death.

In this age, the mere example of non-conformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service. Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric.

all the small squalors of the body, known only to oneself, insignificant in youth, easily dismissed, in old age became dominant and entered into fulfilment of the tyranny they had always threatened.

When we mistake words for reality, we are subject to the tyranny of words.

The practice of arbitrary imprisonments have been, in all ages, the favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny.

Whenever a man believes that he has the exact truth from God, there is in that man no spirit of compromise. He has not the modesty born of the imperfections of human nature; he has the arrogance of theological certainty and the tyranny born of ignorant assurance. Believing himself to be the slave of God, he imitates his master, and of all tyrants the worst is a slave in power.

While the Romans languished under the ignominious tyranny of eunuchs and bishops, the praises of Julian were repeated with transport in every part of the empire, except in the palace of Constantius.

I was there. I saw your sons and your husbands, your brothers and your sweethearts. I saw how they worked, played, fought, and lived. I saw some of them die. I saw more courage, more good humor in the face of discomfort, more love in an era of hate and more devotion to duty than could exist under tyranny.

The road to tyranny, we must never forget, begins with the destruction of the truth.

The so-called literature of escape, with its growing popularity, is in part a revolt against the tyranny of clocks.

We might not object to the statement that Lear deserved to suffer for his folly, selfishness and tyranny; but to assert that he deserved to suffer what he did suffer is to do violence not merely to language but to any healthy moral sense.

Freedom is never easily won, but once established, freedom lasts, spreads and chokes out tyranny.

Religion, a mediaeval form of unreason, when combined with modern weaponry becomes a real threat to our freedoms. This religious totalitarianism has caused a deadly mutation in the heart of Islam and we see the tragic consequences in Paris today. I stand with Charlie Hebdo, as we all must, to defend the art of satire, which has always been a force for liberty and against tyranny, dishonesty and stupidity. 'Respect for religion' has become a code phrase meaning 'fear of religion.' Religions, like all other ideas, deserve criticism, satire, and, yes, our fearless disrespect.

Secrecy is the beginning of tyranny

Tyranny and anarchy are alike incompatible with freedom, security, and the enjoyment of opportunity.

There is a golden thread which runs through British history of the individual, standing firm against tyranny and then of the individual participating in his society

In reality, though, the first thing to ask of history is that it should point out to us the paths of liberty. The great lesson to draw from revolutions is not that they devour humanity but rather that tyranny never fails to generate them.

[Tyranny is] to compel men not to think as they do, to compel men to express thoughts that are not their own.

Tyranny has perhaps oftener grown out of the assumptions of power, called for, on pressing exigencies, by a defective constitution, than out of the full exercise of the largest constitutional authorities.

The very name of a politician, a statesman, is sure to cause terror and hatred; it has always connected with it the ideas of treachery, cruelty, fraud, and tyranny.

Governments can be useful to the governed only so long as inherent tendencies toward tyranny are restrained.

Freedom is necessary for two reasons. It's necessary for the individual, because the individual, no matter how good the society is, every individual has hopes, fears, ambitions, creative urges, that transcend the purposes of his society. Therefore we have a long history of freedom, where people try to extricate themselves from tyranny for the sake of art, for the sake of science, for the sake of religion, for the sake of the conscience of the individual - this freedom is necessary for the individual.

Revolutions have never lightened the burden of tyranny; they have only shifted it to another shoulder.

Resistance to tyranny is service to God.

I'm not a "conservative" because I see precious little left in this world worth conserving. Playing defense, it seems to me, can only forestall an inevitable slide into tyranny.

A good deal of tyranny goes by the name of protection.

We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.

I'm very proud that we stood for the proposition that no man, woman or child should ever have to live in tyranny. We believed in democracy and promoted it.

Play matters because it gives us a brief respite from the tyranny of apparent purpose.

A government which lays taxes on the people not required by urgent public necessity and sound public policy is not a protector of liberty, but an instrument of tyranny. It condemns the citizen to servitude.

I preferred measuring deer tracks to tape - that I liked the wild liberty of the Red men better then the tyranny of my brothers.

I don't trust sentimentality in men; it goes with tyranny; you can't have one without the other.

I am a strong believer in the tyranny, the dictatorship, the absolute authority of the writer.

They [Americans] augur misgovernment at a distance and snuff the approach of tyranny in every tainted breeze.

A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.

It is harder to maintain the balance of freedom than it is to endure the weight of tyranny.

The time to guard against corruption and tyranny is before they shall have gotten hold of us.

The V sign is the symbol of the unconquerable will of the occupied territories, and a portent of the fate awaiting the Nazi tyranny.

What will people say-in these words lies the tyranny of the world, the whole destruction of our natural disposition, the oblique vision of our minds. These four words hold sway everywhere.

The restriction of religion to private life therefore does not necessarily threaten the vital interests of the majority religion, if there is one, and it protects minority religions from tyranny of the majority.

Fear of death has been the greatest ally of tyranny past and present.

The great theme of modern British history is the fate of freedom. The 18th century inherits, after the Civil War, this very peculiar political animal. It's not a democracy, but it's not a tyranny. It's not like the rest of the world, the rest of Europe. There is a parliament, laws have to be made, elections are made.

We're here to mark that day in history when the Allied peoples joined in battle to reclaim this continent to liberty. For four long years, much of Europe had been under a terrible shadow. Free nations had fallen, Jews cried out in the camps, millions cried out for liberation. Europe was enslaved, and the world prayed for its rescue. Here in Normandy the rescue began. Here the Allies stood and fought against tyranny in a giant undertaking unparalleled in human history.

Humans had built a world inside the world, which reflected it in pretty much the same way as a drop of water reflected the landscape. And yet ... and yet ... Inside this little world they had taken pains to put all the things you might think they would want to escape from - hatred, fear, tyranny, and so forth. Death was intrigued. They thought they wanted to be taken out of themselves, and every art humans dreamt up took them further in. He was fascinated.

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.

The tyranny of relativism is the spiritual poverty of our time