Desiderius Erasmus Quotes

Cruel leaders are replaced only to have new leaders turn cruel!

The great men of power who seek to change the nations they belong to usually are pretty terrible people.

The greatest of all evils is a weak government.

Dictators always look good until the last ten minutes.

Politicians as a class are dangerous, that people who are seeking power over us are not, by definition, our friends.

Our authorities leave us no doubt that the trust lodged with the oligarchy was sometimes abused, but it certainly ought not to be regarded as a mere usurpation or engine of tyranny.

Whoever is new to power is always harsh.

The ship of state is the only known vessel that leaks from the top.

Dictators cause the world's worst problems: all the collapsed states, and all the devastated economies. All the vapid cases of corruption, grand theft, and naked plunder of the treasury are caused by dictators, leaving in their wake trails of wanton destruction, horrendous carnage and human debris.

Unlimited power is apt to corrupt the minds of those who posses it; and this I know, my lords: that where law ends, tyranny begins.

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.

This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector.

And remember, where you have a concentration of power in a few hands, all too frequently men with the mentality of gangsters get control. History has proven that.

Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it.

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.

It would be stupid tameness, and unaccountable folly, for whole nations to suffer one unreasonable, ambitious and cruel man, to wanton and riot in their misery.

As long as the wrong people hold power, how can the right political climate even arise?

Arbitrary power is most easily established on the ruins of liberty abused to licentiousness.

Mobutu was mainstream Africa. Every independent African Government was a one-party state at the time. None allowed opposition. Every one of them had rent-seeking political leaders. The only thing that set Mobutu apart was how ostentatious his theft was.

Yes, citizens, Iturbide was a traitor, a hypocrite and an impious man who destroyed the assembly in which the people had deposited their sovereignty in order to appropriate it all to himself

The people are good; the government is not good.

That king who through folly rashly oppresses his kingdom, (will), together with his relatives, ere long be deprived of his life and of his kingdom. As the lives of living creatures are destroyed by tormenting their bodies, even so the lives of kings are destroyed by their oppressing their kingdoms

It is weakness rather than wickedness which renders men unfit to be trusted with unlimited power.

Feelings of marginalization and cries of separation are symptomatic of countries where rulers find power sweet and intoxicating, where power is coveted, and when acquired, painstakingly guarded.

If you give human beings power over others, their natural tendency is to be fascists.