Quotes about tyranny

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

The conventional word that is employed to describe tyranny is “systematic.” The true essence of a dictatorship is in fact not its regularity but its unpredictability and caprice; those who live under it must never be able to relax, must never be quite sure if they have followed the rules correctly or not. (The only rule of thumb was: whatever is not compulsory is forbidden.) Thus, the ruled can always be found to be in the wrong.

Within fifteen years of the war’s end, totalitarianism, a new word for a system that rejected the liberalism and constitutionalism which had inspired European politics since the eclipse of monarchy in 1789, was almost everywhere on the rise. Totalitarianism was the political continuation of war by other means.

Even the people were bred without imaginations. The imaginative ones were fixed—or gotten rid of. Too dangerous to have a thinker unless he thought the government’s way.

“He began to dream the dreams that always seduce a tyrant: powers beyond powers, worlds at his feet, whole realms bowing to his whims.”

“And the dreams occluded his faculties,” I said. “It was ever thus, we may be thankful, else tyrants would never fall.”

Once any tyranny becomes accepted as ordinary, according to Veronica, its victory is assured.

“Not in the least. I have but one ambition.”

“And that is — ?”

“To be the serviceable slave of my country.”

“A master is more serviceable than a slave,” said the old man.

“No; no; I deny it. I can admit much from you, but I cannot admit that. The politician who becomes the master of his country sinks from the statesman to the tyrant.”

There are three fundamental states of social being: tyranny (you do what I want), slavery (I do what you want), or negotiation.

Tradition is the crown of the tyrant.

The trouble with creating military dictators, Locke reflected, was getting rid of them after the immediate crisis was past.

As centuries of dictators have known, an illiterate crowd is easiest to rule; since the craft of reading cannot be untaught once it has been acquired, the second-best recourse is to limit its scope.

Fear not the tyrant; fear the tyrant's wake.