Elihu Root Quotes

Which is better, to be ruled by one tyrant three thousand miles away, or by three thousand tyrants not a mile away?

No freedom to the enemies of freedom

When the United States aligns with dictatorships and totalitarian regimes, it compromises the basic democratic principles of its foundation - namely, life, liberty and justice for all.

The worldwide, agelong struggle between fascism and democracy will not stop when the fighting ends in Germany and Japan.

Despotism can only exist in darkness, and there are too many lights now in the political firmament to permit it to remain anywhere, as it has heretofore done, almost everywhere.

Concentrated power has always been the enemy of liberty.

The main division in the world is between democratic and undemocratic countries.

Every dictator is an enemy of freedom, an opponent of law.

Freedom's skeptics must understand that the democracy that hates you is less dangerous than the dictator who loves you.

The price of freedom is less than the cost of repression.

The ultimate failures of dictatorship cost humanity far more than the temporary failures of democracy.

Only the history of free peoples is worth our attention; the history of men under a despotism is merely a collection of anecdotes.

... timid men who prefer the calm of despotism to the boisterous sea of liberty.

In the battle between democracy and totalitarianism the latter adversary will, without question, win and will control the world. The era of democracy is finished and the democratic system bankrupt. There is not room in the world for two different systems or for two different economies.

No truly sophisticated proponent of repression would be stupid enough to shatter the facade of democratic institutions.

Despotisms usually ground themselves upon the theories of extreme democracy.

The revolutionary government is the despotism of liberty

The spectacle which confronts all Europe today is a great conflict between democracy and dictatorship.

Optimism comes less easily today, not because democracy is less vigorous, but because democracy's enemies have refined their instruments of repression.

There's nothing to fear. I'm not a dictator.

Our city finds itself in an uncomfortable place: on the frontline between freedom and auto_cracy.

A democratic despotism is like a theocracy: it assumes its own correctness.

Despotism subjects a nation to one tyrant; democracy, to many.

Without democracy freedom is a chimera

Despotism can do without faith but freedom cannot.