#dictators

Withholding information is the essence of tyranny. Control of the flow of information is the tool of the dictatorship. ↗

— Bruce Coville

#control #dictatorship #information #tyranny #information

As centuries of dictators have known, an illiterate crowd is the 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. ↗

— Alberto Manguel

#dictators #illiteracy #reading #censorship

The lesson we are indebted to Egypt for, our future generations learned that in the face of oppression silence is never golden. ↗

— Aysha Taryam

#democracy #dictators #dictatorship #egypt #philosophy

My quarrel with Chomsky goes back to the Balkan wars of the 1990s, where he more or less openly represented the "Serbian Socialist Party" (actually the national-socialist and expansionist dictatorship of Slobodan Milosevic) as the victim. Many of us are proud of having helped organize to prevent the slaughter and deportation of Europe's oldest and largest and most tolerant Muslim minority, in Bosnia-Herzegovina and in Kosovo. But at that time, when they were real, Chomsky wasn't apparently interested in Muslim grievances. He only became a voice for that when the Taliban and Al Qaeda needed to be represented in their turn as the victims of a "silent genocide" in Afghanistan. Let me put it like this, if a supposed scholar takes the Christian-Orthodox side when it is the aggressor, and then switches to taking the "Muslim" side when Muslims commit mass murder, I think that there is something very nasty going on. And yes, I don't think it is exaggerated to describe that nastiness as "anti-American" when the power that stops and punishes both aggressions is the United States. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#antiwar-movement #bosnian-war #leftism #noam-chomsky #dictatorship

The degree of liberty or tyranny in any government is in large degree a reflection of the relative determination of the subjects to be free and their willingness and ability to resist efforts to enslave them. ↗

— Gene Sharp

#dictatorship #government #dictatorship

Hegel nota in un passo delle sue opere che tutti i grandi fatti e i grandi personaggi della storia universale si presentano, per così dire, due volte. Ha dimenticato di aggiungere: la prima come tragedia, la seconda come farsa ↗

— Karl Marx

#history #revolution #dictatorship

Without a sound legal system, a small group or even a single person can take control of an entire country. ↗

— Ji Li Jiang

#dictatorship #dictatorship

Generalization is flawed thinking only when applied to individuals. It is the most accurate way to describe the mass, the Wad. And yours is a democracy, a dictatorship of the Wad. ↗

— Trevanian

#generalizations #politics #dictatorship

By placing confidence in violent means, one has chosen the very type of struggle with which the oppressors nearly always have superiority. ↗

— Gene Sharp

#dictatorship

The amount of violations of human rights in a country is always an inverse function of the amount of complaints about human rights violations heard from there. The greater the number of complaints being aired, the better protected are human rights in that country. ↗

— Daniel Patrick Moynihan

#conspiracy-theories #democracy #dictatorship #freedom #human-rights