#despot

The peoples owe all political rights and privileges which we enjoy today in greater or lesser measure, not to the good will of their governments, but to their own strength. One need only study the history of the past three hundred years to understand by what relentless struggles every right has had to be wrested inch by inch from the despots. ↗

— Rudolf Rocker

#freedom #government #privileges #rights #struggle

Whatever crushes individuality is despotism. ↗

— John Stuart Mill

#individuality #liberty #tyranny #liberty

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

#antiwar-movement #axis-of-evil #despotism #foreign-policy #foreign-policy-of-the-us

Small natures require despotism to exercise their sinews, as great souls thirst for equality to give play to their heart. ↗

— Honore de Balzac

#equality #exercise #give #great #great souls

Last chances in the Middle East have been two a dirham since the 1950s. Each year the enmities are more profound, the despots more bloodthirsty and clownish, the violence more extreme, and the conditions of ordinary existence more ghastly. ↗

— James Buchan

#chances #conditions #despots #each #east

The control of information is something the elite always does, particularly in a despotic form of government. Information, knowledge, is power. If you can control information, you can control people. ↗

— Tom Clancy

#control #despotic #does #elite #form

There is one safeguard known generally to the wise, which is an advantage and security to all, but especially to democracies as against despots - suspicion. ↗

— Demosthenes

#against #democracies #despots #especially #generally

Whatever government is not a government of laws, is a despotism, let it be called what it may. ↗

— Daniel Webster

#despotism #government #laws #may #whatever

We always make the mistake in the United States of America in Democratic or Republican administrations alike is we tend to embrace the despot that's least troublesome to us. That should not be the way we view things. ↗

— Anthony Weiner

#always #america #democratic #despot #embrace

Their poverty secured their freedom, since our desires and our possessions are the strongest fetters of despotism. ↗

— Edward Gibbon

#despotism #fetters #freedom #our #possessions