Despotic Rule Quotes

The benevolent despot who sees himself as a shepherd of the people still demands of others the submissiveness of sheep.

The chief evil is unlimited government, and nobody is qualified to wield unlimited power.

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

Unlimited power in the hands of limited people always leads to cruelty.

When your lordships look at the papers transmitted to us from America-- when you consider their decency, firmness, and wisdom, you cannot but respect their cause … For myself I must declare and avow, that in all my reading and observation … that for solidity of reasoning, force of sagacity, and wisdom of conclusion … no nation or body of men can stand in preference to the Congress at Philadelphia. I trust that it is obvious to your lordships, that all attempts to impose servitude upon such men, to establish despotism over such a mighty continental nation, must be vain, must be fatal.

When fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.

Power is poison. Its effects on Presidents had always been tragic; chiefly as an almost insane excitement at first, and a worse reaction afterwards; but also because no mind is so well balanced as to bar the strain of seizing unlimited force without habit or knowledge of it; and finding it disputed with him by hungry packs of wolves and hounds whose lives depend on snatching the carrion.

There is scarce a king in a hundred who would not, if he could, follow the example of Pharoah - get first all the people's money, then all their lands, and then make them and their children servants forever.

One Hundred and Seventy Three Despots would surely be as oppressive as one.

The most insupportable of tyrants exclaim against the exercise of arbitrary power.

Throughout history government has served as a vehicle for the organization of hatred and oppression, benefiting no one except those who are ambitious and ruthless enough to gain control of it.

The truth is that neither then nor at any former time, since I had attained my maturity in Age, Reading and reflection had I imbibed any general Prejudice against Kings, or in favour of them. It appeared to me then as it has done ever since, that there is a State of Society in which a Republican Government is the best, and in America the only one.

Dystopian novels, such as Orwell's 'Nineteen Eighty-Four,' often tend to site their despotised or deformed civilisations in urban environments.

An absolute monarchy is one in which the sovereign does as he pleases so long as he pleases the assassins.

When liberty becomes license, some form of one-man power is not far distant.

An authoritarian style of rule is characteristic of me, and I have always admitted it.

The sovereign is called a tyrant who knows no laws but his caprice.

Indeed, the keynote of government is injustice. With the arrogance and self-sufficiency of the King who could do no wrong, governments ordain, judge, condemn, and punish the most insignificant offenses, while maintaining themselves by the greatest of all offenses, the annihilation of individual liberty.

Tyranny is the exercise of some power over a man, which is not warranted by law, or necessary for the public safety. A people can never be deprived of their liberties, while they retain in their own hands, a power sufficient to any other power in the state.

The manner of their government is much after the Turkish fashion: which they seem to imitate. The state and form of their government is plain tyrannical, as applying all to the behoof of the prince, and that after a after a most open and barbarous manner.... It giveth the nobility a kind of unjust and unmeasured liberty to command and exact upon the commons and baser sort of people in all parts of the realm...

… we cannot conceive of the authority of a despot who knows all his subjects on sight.

In the first place, it is obvious that not only is wealth concentrated in our times but an immense power and despotic economic dictatorship is consolidated in the hands of a few, who often are not owners but only the trustees and managing directors of invested funds which they administer according to their own arbitrary will and pleasure. This dictatorship is being most forcibly exercised by those who, since they hold the money and completely control it, control credit also and rule the lending of money.

Revolution is engendered by an indignation with tyranny, yet is itself pregnant with tyranny.... An attempt to scrutinize men's thoughts and punish their opinions is of all kinds of despotism the most odious: yet this is peculiarly character of a period of revolution.... There is no period more at war with the existence of liberty.

Ill fares the State where many masters rule; let one be lord, one king supreme.

In Russia, whatever be the appearance of things, violence and arbitrary rule is at the bottom of them all. Tyranny rendered calm by the influence of terror is the only kind of happiness which this government is able to afford its people.