#dictator

Vladimir Ilyich (Lenin), your concrete actions are completely unworthy of the ideas you pretend to hold. Is it possible that you do not know what a hostage really is — a man imprisoned not because of a crime he has committed, but only because it suits his enemies to exert blackmail on his companions? ... If you admit such methods, one can foresee that one day you will use torture, as was done in the Middle Ages. I hope you will not answer me that Power is for political men a professional duty, and that any attack against that power must be considered as a threat against which one must guard oneself at any price. This opinion is no longer held even by kings... Are you so blinded, so much a prisoner of your own authoritarian ideas, that you do not realise that being at the head of European Communism, you have no right to soil the ideas which you defend by shameful methods ... What future lies in store for Communism when one of its most important defenders tramples in this way every honest feeling? ↗

— Pyotr Kropotkin

#anarcho-communism #communism #dictatorship #freedom #lenin

[N]icht durch Reden und Majoritätsbeschlüsse werden die großen Fragen der Zeit entschiedenen [...] sondern durch Eisen und Blut. ↗

— Otto von Bismarck

#dictatorship #history #war #dictatorship

The all but unanimous judgment seems to be that we, the democracies, are just as responsible for the rise of the dictators as the dictatorships themselves, and perhaps more so. ↗

— Harry Emerson Fosdick

#dictatorship

Obviously, there must be some connection between the subordination of actual individuals and the grotesque exaltation of symbolic ones like Kim Il Sung. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#dictatorship #kim-il-sung #north-korea #psychology #subordination

The dictatorship is like an aria that never becomes an opera. ↗

— Emilia Pardo Bazán

#opera #political #dictatorship

I call on the Iranian people: it is not too late to replace the corrupt regime and return to your glorious Persian heritage, a heritage of culture and values and not of bombs and missiles... How can a nation allow a regime to instill fear, take away the people's freedom and shock the young generation that seeks its way out of the dictatorial Iran. ↗

— Shimon Peres

#away #bombs #call #corrupt #culture

Dictators must have enemies. They must have internal enemies to justify their secret police and external enemies to justify their military forces. ↗

— Richard Perle

#external #forces #internal #justify #military

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

Even a polemic has some justification if one considers that my own first poetic experiments began during a dictatorship and mark the origin of the Hermetic movement. ↗

— Salvatore Quasimodo

#considers #dictatorship #during #even #experiments

The death of dictator Kim Jong-Il has cast all eyes on North Korea, a country without literature or freedom or truth. ↗

— Adam Johnson

#country #death #dictator #eyes #freedom