Strongmen Quotes

All governments must maintain power by consent. Not by coercion.

Everybody likes to go to Geneva. I used to do it for the Law of the Sea conferences and you'd find those potentates from down in Africa, you know, rather than eating each other, they'd just come up and get a good square meal in Geneva

Unless you’re prepared to use force, it’s very difficult to deal with a person who understands only force.

How can you ever ensure that you will get a beneficent dictator?

In all our history, there is no change of government peacefully.

China … has gone from being ruled by strongmen with personal credibility to leaders who are constrained by collective decision making, term limits and other norms, public opinion, and their own technocratic characters.

One thing for certain you will not ever hear from me is praise for dictators and strongmen who have no love for America.

If we did not give the third term a green light, we were going to be in for trouble. We had convened earlier on April 30, as judges of the constitutional court to look at the provisions of the law, the Constitution and the Arusha Peace Accord to ascertain if indeed Nkurunziza was eligible to stand for another term in office and we found that he did not qualify for one. We went home with a plan of returning the next day to sign the decision, but that same evening all judges started receiving threatening phone calls. On May 1, feeling threatened, the judges decided to sign a document clearing Nkurunziza to seek another term

Strongmen? You have to have strong people to rule. South America is a rough place.

We don't have warlords. We have strongmen. They control provinces with military forces. These men at one time controlled territory; they have now been transformed into businessmen and politicians. Today our national security forces are built to control the provinces.

I go still further and affirm, that, supposing even a nation had been really willing to grant their sovereign an arbitrary and unlimited power, this concession would of itself be void and of no effect.

Political parties, wherever they have developed, are … the outgrowths of family and of the family-based relationship between the strongman and his clients.