21 Quotes About Despotism

The most influential dictators in the world have one thing in common: they used despotism to control their people and establish an authoritarian regime. They influenced history and left a lasting impact through their tyranny over their nation. Whether they were presidents, kings, or dictators, their tactics and strategies will teach us a lot about how to maintain power and authority over others. While we may not be able to control the actions of tyrants from the past, we can learn from them how to be a leader of our own Read more

Read on for these quotes from some of history’s most notorious leaders on why they used despotism.

Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous...
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Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of Liberty. Thomas Jefferson
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History has seen many who claim to be deliverer and saviour of the people. They might come with force and violence and parade their might and splendour as conquerors. The pharaohs of Egypt, Sennacherib king of Assyria, Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon, Darius of Persia, Alexander the Great, Hannibal, Napoleon, Clive of India, Bismarck, the Kaiser, Hitler, Stalin. The story and scene is always the same. They claim to deliver the people from bondage and to establish justice, freedom and peace. They come in might, riding in splendour, dragging prisoners. John Myer
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First Afghanistan, now Iraq. So who's next? Syria? North Korea? Iran? Where will it all end?' If these illegal interventions are permitted to continue, the implication seems to be, pretty soon, horror of horrors, no murderously repressive regimes might remain. Daniel Kofman
I love my country, not my government.
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I love my country, not my government. Jesse Ventura
We are not to expect to be translated from despotism...
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We are not to expect to be translated from despotism to liberty in a featherbed. Thomas Jefferson
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Mis-define the law of brotherly love by giving men a claim on their neighbors and you have destroyed freedom, justified despotism, and assumed that there can be a master mind, in an ordinary human being, as the mind of God. Frederick Nymeyer
Ethics and oversight are what you eliminate when you want...
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Ethics and oversight are what you eliminate when you want absolute power. DaShanne Stokes
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The Greeks made Space the subject-matter of a science of supreme simplicity and certainty. Out of it grew, in the mind of classical antiquity, the idea of pure science. Geometry became one of the most powerful expressions of that sovereignty of the intellect that inspired the thought of those times. At a later epoch, when the intellectual despotism of the Church, which had been maintained through the Middle Ages, had crumbled, and a wave of scepticism threatened to sweep away all that had seemed most fixed, those who believed in Truth clung to Geometry as to a rock, and it was the highest ideal of every scientist to carry on his science 'more geometrico. . Hermann Weyl
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When the Rule of Law disappears, we are ruled by the whims of men. Tiffany Madison
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From being a movement aiming for universal freedom, communism turned into a system of universal despotism. That is the logic of utopia. John N. Gray
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As a nation, we began by declaring that 'all men are created equal.' We now practically read it 'all men are created equal, except negroes.' When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read 'all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.' When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty — to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy. Abraham Lincoln
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If there is one fact we really can prove, from the history that we really do know, it is that despotism can be a development, often a late development and very often indeed the end of societies that have been highly democratic. A despotism may almost be defined as a tired democracy. As fatigue falls on a community, the citizens are less inclined for that eternal vigilance which has truly been called the price of liberty; and they prefer to arm only one single sentinel to watch the city while they sleep. G.k. Chesterton
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Man does not necessarily begin with despotism because he is barbarous, but very often finds his way to despotism because he is civilised. He finds it because he is experienced; or, what is often much the same thing, because he is exhausted G.k. Chesterton
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The foremost, or indeed the sole condition, which is required in order to succeed in centralizing the supreme power in a democratic community, is to love equality, or to get men to believe you love it. Thus, the science of despotism, which was once so complex, is simplified, and reduced, as it were, to a single principle. Alexis De Tocqueville
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Russell observes that "the merits of democracy are negative: it does not ensure good government, but it prevents certain evils, " such as the evil of a small group of individuals achieving a secure monopoly on political power. The chief peril for the politician, Russell insists, is love of power. And politicians can easily yield to the love of power on the pretense that they are pursuing some absolute good. Bertrand Russell
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The fall of moral civilization has always been brought about by those who were "just doing their jobs". Jeremy Grantham
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Europeans have sometimes been beguiled by a despotism that comes concealed in the seductive form of an ideal — as it did in the cases of Hitler and Stalin. This fact may remind us that the possibility of despotism is remote neither in space nor in time. Kenneth Minogue
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But now I understand something more fully that I once only understood abstractly. I see how utterly ridiculous it is to think that the state can be the right means to help those who are poor or living at the margins of society. The state is their enemy, as it is for everyone else. Jeffrey Tucker
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No despotism, no privileged monopolies, no police societies, no divine rights of the emirs or feudal landlords or shady priests and sheikhs. All had the same equal footing–the rich and the poor, the noble and the common. Rami Ollaik
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Democracy passes into despotism. Plato