#dictatorship

Every one of the world's dictatorships can and does claim to be acting in the name of the people. ↗

— Harold H. Greene

#claim #dictatorships #does #every #name

I can remember when I was a bit of an ETA fan myself. It was in 1973, when a group of Basque militants assassinated Adm. Carrero Blanco. The admiral was a stone-faced secret police chief, personally groomed to be the successor to the decrepit Francisco Franco. His car blew up, killing only him and his chauffeur with a carefully planted charge, and not only was the world well rid of another fascist, but, more important, the whole scheme of extending Franco's rule was vaporized in the same instant. The dictator had to turn instead to Crown Prince Juan Carlos, who turned out to be the best Bourbon in history and who swiftly dismantled Franco's entire system. If this action was 'terrorism,' it had something to be said for it. Everyone I knew in Spain made a little holiday in their hearts when the gruesome admiral went sky-high. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#dictatorship

Look, words are like the air: they belong to everybody. Words are not the problem; it's the tone, the context, where those words are aimed, and in whose company they are uttered. Of course murderers and victims use the same words, but I never read the words utopia, or beauty, or tenderness in police descriptions. Do you know that the Argentinean dictatorship burnt The Little Prince ? And I think they were right to do so, not because I do not love The Little Prince , but because the book is so full of tenderness that it would harm any dictatorship. ↗

— Juan Gelman

#the-little-prince #words #beauty

We have gone through everything as a nation - partition, dictatorship, and even anarchy. ↗

— Fatos Nano

#dictatorship #even #everything #gone #nation

I never thought about becoming a politician. But during the military dictatorship, my grandfather was put in prison six times and my father twice. If my family and my country didn't have this history, I might be a professor somewhere today. ↗

— Georgios A. Papandreou

#becoming #country #dictatorship #during #family

We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one's own ego and one's own desires. ↗

— Joseph Ratzinger

#certain #desires #dictatorship #does #ego

Dictatorships start wars because they need external enemies to exert internal control over their own people. ↗

— Richard Perle

#control #dictatorships #exert #external #internal

Maintain democracy or go to dictatorship: that is what is at stake in these elections. ↗

— Mario Vargas Llosa

#dictatorship #elections #go #maintain #stake

Aren't we at the point where the closer we get to chaos, the more concern that there should be about coming to the table and compromising with Democrats? This is not leadership. This is almost like dictatorship. ↗

— Debbie Wasserman Schultz

#almost #chaos #closer #coming #compromising

I was interested by the idea that artists working in a totalitarian dictatorship or tsarist autocracy are secretly and slightly shamefully envied by artists who work in freedom. They have the gratification of intense interest: the authorities want to put them in jail, while there are younger readers for whom what they write is pure oxygen. ↗

— Tom Stoppard

#authorities #autocracy #dictatorship #envied #freedom