#authoritarian

For us Africans, literature must serve a purpose: to expose, embarrass, and fight corruption and authoritarianism. It is understandable why the African artist is utilitarian. ↗

— Ama Ata Aidoo

#artist #authoritarianism #corruption #embarrass #expose

We begin the path toward defeating Mexico's real adversary, who represents authoritarianism and the worst antidemocratic practice, who represents a return to corruption as a system and impunity as conviction. That adversary is Pena Nieto and his party. ↗

— Josefina Vazquez Mota

#authoritarianism #begin #conviction #corruption #defeating

History proves that all dictatorships, all authoritarian forms of government are transient. Only democratic systems are not transient. Whatever the shortcomings, mankind has not devised anything superior. ↗

— Vladimir Putin

#authoritarian #democratic #devised #dictatorships #forms

The strengthening of our statehood is, at times, deliberately interpreted as authoritarianism. ↗

— Vladimir Putin

#deliberately #interpreted #our #strengthening #times

I had some things I had to fix. It took me 14 years to do it. But it was never really fun back in the day to work with directors who were a lot older and were like authoritarian and talking to you like that. ↗

— Mickey Rourke

#back #day #directors #fix #fun

The response of anybody interested in liberty is that we all have a say and the ability to have an argument is exactly what liberty is, even though it may never be resolved. In any authoritarian society the possessor of power dictates, and if you try and step outside he will come after you. ↗

— Salman Rushdie

#after #any #anybody #argument #authoritarian

There are certain people within the new government who have a slightly disturbing tendency toward authoritarianism, but there are so many checks and balances that in that way their noises are just noises. ↗

— Jonathan Shapiro

#balances #certain #checks #disturbing #government

That the more authoritarian organizations survive and prevail goes generally unnoticed because people focus on the objectives of organizations, which are many and varied, rather than on their structures, which lend to be similar. ↗

— Robert Shea

#because #focus #generally #goes #lend

Question authority... Then ignore it! ↗

— Joseph Barjack

#diy #inspirational #thinking #inspirational

I was astonished, bewildered. This was America, a country where, whatever its faults, people could speak, write, assemble, demonstrate without fear. It was in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights. We were a democracy... But I knew it wasn't a dream; there was a painful lump on the side of my head... The state and its police were not neutral referees in a society of contending interests. They were on the side of the rich and powerful. Free speech? Try it and the police will be there with their horses, their clubs, their guns, to stop you. From that moment on, I was no longer a liberal, a believer in the self-correcting character of American democracy. I was a radical, believing that something fundamental was wrong in this country--not just the existence of poverty amidst great wealth, not just the horrible treatment of black people, but something rotten at the root. The situation required not just a new president or new laws, but an uprooting of the old order, the introduction of a new kind of society--cooperative, peaceful, egalitarian. ↗

— Howard Zinn

#authoritarianism #bill-of-rights #constitution #democracy #egalitarianism