Ben Nicholson Quotes

Utopian movements produce dystopias.

Africa has more dictators per capita than any other continent.

Tyranny naturally arises out of democracy.

To assume all the powers is not good for anybody. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. All those experiments have a bad ending.

Republics decline into democracies and democracies degenerate into despotisms.

Dictators are allergic to reform, and they are cunning survivors. They will do whatever it takes to preserve their power and wealth, no matter how much blood ends up on their hands. They are master deceivers and talented manipulators who cannot be trusted to change.

Whether it comes from a despotic sovereign or an elected president, from a murderous general or a beloved leader, I see power as an inhuman and hateful phenomenon.

The ordinary man with extraordinary power is the chief danger for mankind - not the fiend or the sadist.

For much of the twentieth century, 1984 was a year that belonged to the future - a strange, gray future at that. Then it slid painlessly into the past, like any other year. Big Brother arrived and settled in, though not at all in the way George Orwell had imagined.

If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.

Orwell's '1984' convinced me, rightly or wrongly, that Marxism was only a quantum leap away from tyranny. By contrast, Huxley's 'Brave New World' suggested that the totalitarian systems of the future might be subservient and ingratiating.

Democracy is political corruption which must be effectively done away with.

The rule of several bad men does not last long, and easily decays to the rule of a single tyrant.

Absolute power should never be trusted to man. It has perverted the wisest heads, and corrupted the best hearts in the world. I should be afraid to commit my property, liberty and life to a body of angels for one whole year.

So long as people believe in the perfectibility of man, they will continue to use those freedom-destroying ‘bad means’ (totalitarianism) that promise the quickest shortcut to this ‘good end.’

Politics without responsibility IS fascism.

President Maliki: The appetite has grown with the eating. He has become a real dictator.

I dedicate this book [The German Dictatorship] to the hope that a sober picture of the German dictatorship may help Germany avoid both old and new dangers, primarily the traditional authoritarian concept of the state, but also radical utopianism—both expressions of intolerance and conceit, and moreover, profoundly unpolitical modes of behavior

Erdogon has become so paranoid, so power-hungry, he doesn't even allow institutions to flourish. It has become a one-man show.

When the state was going to tell you what your future would be, science fiction was irrelevant.

Mobutu does not think he is God.

We must mistrust utopias: they usually end in holocausts.

The combination of economic and political power in the same hands is a sure recipe for tyranny.

Revolution means democracy in today's world, not the enslavement of peoples to the corrupt and degrading horrors of totalitarianism