Vladimir Lenin Quotes

In domestic as in political tyranny, the case of absolute monsters chiefly illustrates the institution by showing that there is scarcely any horror which may not occur under it if the despot pleases

That's how dictators get started.

I believe Donald Trump is a bona fide authoritarian. I am deeply concerned that if he were president of the United States, he would act accordingly.

Kim Jong-un's style is more suggestive of Saddam Hussein or his murderous son, Uday Hussein.

Moammar Gaddafi, who has called himself the 'Guide of the First of September Great Revolution of the Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya,' should go down in history with the Emperor Bokassa and Idi Amin as a grotesque reminder of why people have the right to change their government.

For 73 years a totalitarian regime ruled the country. Totalitarian regime.

Oppressive government is more terrible than tigers.

To trample democracy with one’s feet and to give power to a single man over almost eighty million people is so terrible that one can very probably tremble over the events which will come here.

I am inclined to believe dictators. Not to is dangerous.

All the calamities we have experienced, and those which are yet to come, are the result of the consolidating tendency of this government; and unless this tendency be arrested, all that has been foretold will certainly befall us,—even to the pouring out of the last vial of wrath, military despotism.

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

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

Colonel Qaddafi's tyranny was absolutist, monarchical, and personal. The problem with such dictatorships is that as long as the tyrant lives, he reigns and terrorizes.

Authoritarianism doesn't fall on a nation like a book falling from a shelf and striking you in the head. It rolls in like a slow tide.

Europeans have sometimes been beguiled by a despotism that comes concealed in the seductive form of an ideal – as it did in the cases of Hitler and Stalin. This fact may remind us that the possibility of despotism is remote neither in space nor in time.

It can't happen here is always wrong: a dictatorship can happen anywhere.

It didn't take long for the world to realize that the Shah was an enlightened liberal next to the bloody reactionary regime that followed, and which executed more people in three months than the Shah had done in 30 years.

Despotism increases in severity with the number of despots; the responsibility is more divided, and the claims are more numerous.

We've been saying Putin is a dictator for years who doesn't care about the law.

A collective tyrant, spread over the length and breadth of the land, is no more acceptable than a single tyrant ensconced on his throne.

In most of history, societies have not been free. It's a very rare society that is free. The default condition of human societies is tyranny.

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

Every tyrant who has lived has believed in freedom for himself.

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.