Alexander Lukashenko Quotes

History reminds us that dictators and despots arise during times of severe economic crisis.

By the late 1970s, repression and economic chaos were causing increasing unrest throughout Latin America. Army strongmen were forced to cede power in Peru, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Ecuador, Bolivia, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras and the Dominican Republic.

A repressed minority is an angry one, which may ultimately threaten the government's stability.

If Saddam were to be replaced tomorrow he would probably be replaced with someone who's just as bad or worse than he is.

The Arab Spring is over. The days of the protesters with laptops and BlackBerrys in Tahrir Square are long gone.

Mobs and dictators were made for each other, and when mobs appear, dictators will soon flourish.

Unless something drastic is done very soon, then bloodshed and violence are going to happen…almost inevitably… A people made desperate by despair and injustice and oppression will use desperate means.

The Arab world is ripe for internal revolution like the USSR and China in the past decade.

Citizens, we have reason to fear that the Revolution, like Saturn, will successively devour all its children, and only produce despotism and the calamities which accompany it.

When citizens have no political way to deal with revolution, they become counter-revolutionary.

All at present is quiet in Paris. There are Socialist risings in many parts of the country, but all these will do the President [coup leader Louis Napoleon] good, and strengthen his hands, for even the people who have been treated with indignity will pardon him if their châteaux are saved from an infuriated and brutal peasantry.

Because authoritarian regimes lack popular legitimacy, they often manipulate and deepen communal cleavages in order to divide potential opponents and generate support among favored groups. So when democratization occurs, the pent up distrust and animosity often explode.

The more brutal the dictator, the harder to oust.

The most blood-boltered coup may result merely in a substitution of interchangeable military cliques.

Beijing, much as it has done with Hong Kong, persists in equating 'people power' with instability.

The Tunisian revolution left every Arab dictator in fear; Egypt's toppling of Mubarak left them terrified - even one of the U.S.' best allies in the region could fall.

Shoot the dictator and prevent the war? But the dictator is merely the tip of the whole festering boil of social pus from which dictators emerge; shoot him and there'll be another one along in a minute. Shoot him too? Why not shoot everyone and invade Poland?

Repression breeds hate; hate menaces stable government.

Listen, 'The Purge' actually exists in some form or another in many places around the world when you think about it.

The problem with leaderless uprisings taking over is that you don't always know what you get at the other end. If you are not careful you could replace a bad government with one much worse!

Only two countries in this hemisphere are not democratic, but many countries in both Central and South America, and in the Caribbean, are really fragile democracies.

The regime is afraid of the people because it knows that free and fair elections will bring about its end.

For every African state, like Ghana, where democratic institutions seem secure, there is a Mali, a Cote d'Ivoire, and a Zimbabwe, where democracy is in trouble.

The Arab Spring showed that people are not going to wait for an American president to make good on his big talk about democracy and human rights; they are going to fight for those rights themselves and overthrow pro-American dictators who stand in their way.

Revolution may not be pro-Western or democratic.