Absolutism Quotes

When one turns from reason to faith, when one rejects the absolutism of reality, one undercuts the absolutism of one's consciousness - and one's mind becomes an organ one cannot trust any longer. It becomes what the mystics claim it to be: a tool of distortion.

Moral relativism says morality is relative, not absolute, I want to show moral relativism, in its popular form, is logically incoherent.

Democracy is like virginity. You can’t have just some of it.

Starting from unlimited freedom, I conclude with unlimited despotism.

One of Ivan the Terrible's mistakes was to overlook the five great feudal families. If he had annihilated those five families, there would definitely have been no Time of Troubles. But Ivan the Terrible would execute someone and then spend a long time repenting and praying. God got in his way in this matter. He ought to have been still more decisive!

Resistance to absolutism is characteristic of democratic progress.

It is not that there are no certainties, it is that it is an absolute certainty that there are no certainties.

The Russian Czars did a great deal that was bad. They robbed and enslaved the people. They waged wars and seized territories in the interest of landowners. But they did one thing that was good—they amassed an enormous state.

Unlike Washington, the California legislature has proved that cooperation is both possible and essential to successful policymaking, while stubborn absolutism will have you trailing head lice in popularity polls.

We are not final because we are infallible; we are infallible because we are final.

I am black or white, I'll never be grey in my life.

Revolutions that cannot resist regicide—the French and the Russian come to mind—have a way of ending badly.

Dictatorship naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme liberty.

Your dependence upon the crown is no advantage, but rather an injury to the people of Britain, as it increases the power and influence of the King.

What a triumph for the advocates of despotism to find that we are incapable of governing ourselves, and that systems founded on the basis of equal liberty are merely ideal and fallacious.

The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.

To forgive all is as inhuman as to forgive none

Not only was one cartoonist gunned down, but riots erupted around the world, resulting in the deaths of scores. No one could say toward what positive social end, yet free-speech absolutists were unchastened.

One faith, one law and one standard of justice did not mean democracy. The heresy of democracy has since then worked havoc in church and state . . . Christianity and democracy are inevitably enemies.

A nation ignorant of the equal benefits of liberty and law, must be awed by the flashes of arbitrary power: the cruelty of a despot will assume the character of justice; his profusion, of liberality; his obstinacy, of firmness.

Those who have no absolute values cannot let the relative remain merely relative; they are always raising it to the level of the absolute.

I beheld absolutism in all its power; and I felt encouraged to enter into a struggle against Augustin I.

When distant and unfamiliar and complex things are communicated to great masses of people, the truth suffers a considerable and often a radical distortion. The complex is made over into the simple, the hypothetical into the dogmatic, and the relative into an absolute.

I want to give moral relativism the good spanking it deserves.

Doubt is uncomfortable, certainty is ridiculous.