Military Dictatorship Quotes

General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, and other military chieftains, have by force of arms, overthrown the federal institutions of Mexico, and dissolved the social compact which existed between Texas and the other members of the Mexican Confederacy

A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant, at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient bureaucracy.

There was the situation in Nicaragua where the Sandinistas had taken over a couple of years earlier. There was a civil war going on in El Salvador and there was a similar situation in Guatemala. So Honduras was in a rather precarious geographic position indeed.

Military dictatorship is born from the power of the gun, and so it undermines the concept of the rule of law and gives birth to a culture of might, a culture of weapons, violence and intolerance.

All military regimes use security as the reason why they should remain in power. It's nothing original.

I feel much alarmed at the prospect of seeing General Jackson President. He is one of the most unfit men I know of for such a place. He has had very little respect for laws and constitutions, and is, in fact, an able military chief. His passions are terrible.

Though it has been said … that a Standing-Army is necessary for the dignity and safety of America, yet freedom revolts at the idea, when … Despot, may draw out his dragoons to suppress the murmurs of a few, who may yet cherish those sublime principles …. Standing armies have been the nursery of vice and the bane of liberty from the Roman legions to the establishment of the artful Ximenes, and from the ruin of the Cortes of Spain, to the planting of the British cohorts in the capitals of America.

The trouble with military rule is that every colonel or general is soon full of ambition. The navy takes over today and the army tomorrow.

Military rule in Indonesia formally ended in 1998, but the army remains above the law.

There will be no morality in the world unless the Emperor abdicates as quickly as circumstances permit…. The Emperor bears responsibility for being extremely negligent in the performance of his duties. He permitted the behavior of the military cliques and for many years did not do what he should have done.

The rifle and handgun are 'equalizers' -- the weapons of a democracy. Tanks and bombers represent dictatorship.

The Iraqi Baath Socialist Party was modelled in large part on admiration for European National Socialist and Fascist movements, hoped to emulate them especially in their nationalism against the West. But mutated by Saddam Hussein it became also one that very, very much admired, and grew a special moustache in admiration of the work of Yosif Vissarionovitch Dzugashvili, the great Georgian known to us historically as Stalin. So you had him in modern Iraq, a regime in our own time, that was openly, directly modelled upon the two most extreme examples of European totalitarianism.

Two soldiers and a villain are enough to blow up the rights of the citizens.

There's only one man really responsible for those events - Yahya Khan. Both he and his advisers were so drunk with power and corruption they'd even forgotten the honor of the army.

Similar questions were posed to Allende as to me. Allende was told that he blamed everything on a conspiracy, on the economic crisis, that he blamed the high inflation that sabotaged him on the United States, and that he was frequently accusing the little lambs of Nixon and Kissinger of a coup. But everything became known later.

I never blamed Pinochet, or my torturers, or external circumstances.

I grew up in Taiwan, which was a military dictatorship.

We have been under military rule since 1952, when a group of army officers overthrew Egypt's monarchy and ended Britain's occupation of the country. But that only replaced an external occupation with an internal one, in which favored sons of the armed forces replaced their uniforms with suits, a move meant to create a semblance of civilian rule.

…In certain parts of Latin America, the seizure of the vast majority of the wealth by an oligarchy of owners bereft of social consciousness, the practical absence or the shortcomings of a rule of law, military dictators making a mockery of elementary human rights, the corruption of certain powerful officials, the savage practices of some foreign capital interests constitute factors which nourish a passion for revolt among those who thus consider themselves the powerless victims of a new colonialism in the technological, financial, monetary, or economic order.

Why can't the Indonesians have an Islamic theocracy if they want? Why can't the Pakistanis have a military dictatorship? Why can't the Serbs run their own country the way they prefer? What is the appeal in making sure that people whose minds have been wasted by Alzheimer's Disease vote? Well, let's not beat around the bush: the appeal of mass democracy lies in the fact that in essentially every country in the world today, the number of persons unable to think for themselves is substantially larger than the number able to make independent decisions. Those unable to think for themselves have their thinking done for them by the people who control the mass media. Which is to say, democracy is the preferred system because it gives the political power to those who own or control the mass media and at the same time allows them to remain behind the scenes and evade responsibility for the way in which they use that power.

From the early 1960s to the mid-1980s - the era of military dictatorship when South Korea was rebuilding itself from a postwar economic basket case to a humming, modern nation - military schools were the track of choice for ambitious young men.

I think the difference between El Salvador and Nicaragua is that in Nicaragua you had a popular insurrection, and in El Salvador you had a revolution.

Despite egregious human rights abuses, military dictatorship in Greece, and Russian atrocities in Chechnya, no state has ever been voted out of the Council of Europe.

Any comparison between the military dictatorship and democracy can only come from those who do not value the Brazilian democracy.

I have lived with my conscience and my own memories for over quarter of a century since the events of 1973. These are not easy reflections for me. But I am at peace with myself, and with the Chilean people, about what happened. I am clear in my mind that the return to Chile of true democracy, and from that the true freedom to which all individual people are entitled, could not have been achieved without the removal of the Marxist government.