#dictator

We have to implant democracies where there are now dictatorships. ↗

— Tom Tancredo

#dictatorships #implant #now #where

I'm not a prophet, but I always thought it was natural for dictatorships to fall. I remember in 1989, two months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, had you said it was going to happen no one would have believed you. The system seemed powerful and unbreakable. Suddenly overnight it blew away like dust. ↗

— Salman Rushdie

#away #before #believed #berlin #berlin wall

Only that Swiss in the heart want still a king or at least a strong Upper House of Parliament. Swiss long themselves for less democracy and more dictatorship. ↗

— Peter Bichsel

#dictatorship #heart #house #king #least

Within a system which denies the existence of basic human rights, fear tends to be the order of the day. Fear of imprisonment, fear of torture, fear of death, fear of losing friends, family, property or means of livelihood, fear of poverty, fear of isolation, fear of failure. A most insidious form of fear is that which masquerades as common sense or even wisdom, condemning as foolish, reckless, insignificant or futile the small, daily acts of courage which help to preserve man's self-respect and inherent human dignity. It is not easy for a people conditioned by fear under the iron rule of the principle that might is right to free themselves from the enervating miasma of fear. Yet even under the most crushing state machinery courage rises up again and again, for fear is not the natural state of civilized man. ↗

— Aung San Suu Kyi

#dictatorship #dignity #fear #freedom #human-rights

You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police ... yet in their hearts there is unspoken fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts: words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home -- all the more powerful because forbidden -- terrify them. A little mouse of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic. ↗

— Winston Churchill

#dictatorship #fear #freedom #government #independent-thought

La libertà è uno stato di grazia e si è liberi solo mentre si lotta per conquistarla. ↗

— Luis Sepúlveda

#chile #dictatorship #freedom #freedom

And I think being a good director is being able to be completely tyrannical and you?ve got to be an absolute dictator while at the same time, you have to listen and see everything because it can all change on a dime. ↗

— Bob Balaban

#absolute #because #being #change #completely

It is hard to look the other way when a dictator is being so cruel and violent with his own people. ↗

— Tammy Baldwin

#cruel #dictator #hard #his #look

I saw what happened when a dictator was allowed to take over a piece of a country and the country went down the tubes. And I saw the opposite during the war when America joined the fight. ↗

— Madeleine Albright

#america #country #dictator #down #during

There are, of course, all sorts of other unpleasant regimes outside the walls as well - the military dictators of Latin America and the apartheid regime of South Africa. ↗

— Barbara Amiel

#america #apartheid #course #dictators #latin