#dictatorship

Television has made dictatorship impossible but democracy unbearable. ↗

— Shimon Peres

#dictatorship #impossible #made #television #unbearable

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

The revolution is a dictatorship of the exploited against the exploiters. ↗

— Fidel Castro

#against #dictatorship #exploited #revolution

Look at the Paris Commune. That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. ↗

— Friedrich Engels

#dictatorship #look #paris #proletariat

So I think we should stay focused on the real problem in the Middle East. It's not Israel. It's these dictatorships that are developing nuclear weapons with the specific goal of wiping Israel away. ↗

— Benjamin Netanyahu

#developing #dictatorships #east #focused #goal

If I were a dictator, religion and state would be separate. I swear by my religion. I will die for it. But it is my personal affair. The state has nothing to do with it. The state would look after your secular welfare, health, communications, foreign relations, currency and so on, but not your or my religion. That is everybody's personal concern! ↗

— Mahatma Gandhi

#dictatorship #gandhi #politics #privacy #religion

One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. ↗

— George Orwell

#revolution

The senator had only one argument in his favour: his feeling. When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object. In the realm of kitsch, the dictatorship of the heart reigns supreme. ↗

— Milan Kundera

#dictatorship

I got hold of a copy of the video that showed how Saddam Hussein had actually confirmed himself in power. This snuff-movie opens with a plenary session of the Ba'ath Party central committee: perhaps a hundred men. Suddenly the doors are locked and Saddam, in the chair, announces a special session. Into the room is dragged an obviously broken man, who begins to emit a robotic confession of treason and subversion, that he sobs has been instigated by Syrian and other agents. As the (literally) extorted confession unfolds, names begin to be named. Once a fellow-conspirator is identified, guards come to his seat and haul him from the room. The reclining Saddam, meanwhile, lights a large cigar and contentedly scans his dossiers. The sickness of fear in the room is such that men begin to crack up and weep, rising to their feet to shout hysterical praise, even love, for the leader. Inexorably, though, the cull continues, and faces and bodies go slack as their owners are pinioned and led away. When it is over, about half the committee members are left, moaning with relief and heaving with ardent love for the boss. (In an accompanying sequel, which I have not seen, they were apparently required to go into the yard outside and shoot the other half, thus sealing the pact with Saddam. I am not sure that even Beria or Himmler would have had the nerve and ingenuity and cruelty to come up with that.) ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#ba-athism #ba-athist-iraq #beria #conspiracy #cull

Despotic governments can stand 'moral force' till the cows come home; what they fear is physical force. ↗

— George Orwell

#dictatorship #interventionism #pacifism #totalitarianism #war