Autocracy Quotes

• It would be folly to argue that the people cannot make political mistakes. They can and do make grave mistakes. They know it, they pay the penalty, but compared with the mistakes which have been made by every kind of autocracy they are unimportant.

  Calvin Coolidge

  Mistake, People, Political

  Calvin Coolidge (1924). “Calvin Coolidge, His Ideals of Citizenship as Revealed Through His Speeches and Writings”

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• In an autocracy, one person has his way; in an aristocracy, a few people have their way; in a democracy, no one has his way.

  Celia Green

  People, Democracy, Aristocracy

  Celia Elizabeth Green (1976). “The decline and fall of science”, Hamish Hamilton

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• Autocracy cannot do without its twin agents: a hangman and a priest, the first to suppress popular resistance by force, the second to sweeten and embellish the lot of the oppressed with empty promises of a heavenly kingdom.

  Vladimir Lenin

  Promise, Religion, Atheism

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• In nation after nation, democracy has taken the place of autocracy.

  John Charles Polanyi

  Taken, Democracies Have, Democracy

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• The money power preys on the nation in times of peace, and conspires against it in times of adversity. It is more despotic than monarchy, more insolent than autocracy, more selfish than bureaucracy. It denounces, as public enemies, all who question its methods or throw light upon its crimes.

  Abraham Lincoln

  Money, Selfish, Adversity

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• The deadliest foe of democracy is not autocracy but liberty frenzied.

  Otto Hermann Kahn

  Democracy, Liberty, Foe

  Otto Hermann Kahn (1918). “Frenzied Liberty: The Myth of "a Rich Man's War"”

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• It is acknowledged, namely, that there are in the world three forms of government, autocracy, oligarchy, and democracy: autocracies and oligarchies are administered according to the tempers of their lords, but democratic states according to established laws.

  Aeschines

  Government, Law, Democracy

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• Under capitalism, we can't have democracy by definition. Capitalism is a system in which the central institutions of society are in principle under autocratic control.

  Noam Chomsky

  Democracy, Principles, Definitions

  Noam Chomsky (2004). “Language and Politics”, p.138, AK Press

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• Totalitarianism surpasses autocracy.

  Bernard Crick

  Totalitarianism

  Bernard Crick (1993). “In Defense of Politics”, p.40, University of Chicago Press

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• It is not true that democracy will always safeguard freedom of conscience better than autocracy. Witness the most famous of all trials. Pilate was, from the standpoint of the Jews, certainly the representative of autocracy. Yet he tried to protect freedom. And he yielded to a democracy.

  Joseph A. Schumpeter

  Freedom, Democracy, Trials

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• The chief support of an autocracy is a standing army. The chief support of a democracy is an educated people.

  Lotus Coffman

  Army, People, Support

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• No outdoor sports can be more elegant than throwing stones at autocracy; no melees can be more exciting than those in cyberspace.

  Ai Weiwei

  Sports, Cyberspace, Throwing Stones

  Ai Weiwei Twitter feed: @AiWW, March 10, 2010.

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• Every nation has its war party. It is not the party of democracy. It is the party of autocracy. It seeks to dominate absolutely.

  Robert M. La Follette, Sr.

  Peace, War, Party

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• The disruptive powers of excessive national fecundity may have played a greater part in bursting the bonds of convention than either the power of ideas or the errors of autocracy.

  John Maynard Keynes

  Ideas, Ties, Errors

  John Maynard Keynes (2016). “The Economic Consequences of the Peace”, p.15, Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.

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• Aside from the occasional genocide, oppression, evil and torture, etc., it is inarguable that public policy could be implemented more rapidly in an autocracy.

  David Harsanyi

  Evil, Etc, Oppression

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• Russia is leading a movement around the world to spread autocracy and authoritarianism.

  Adam Schiff

  Russia, Movement, World

  Source: abcnews.go.com

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• In tribal times, there were the medicine men. In the Middle Ages, there were the priests. Today, there are the lawyers. For every age, a group of bright boys, learned in their trades and jealous of their learning, who blend technical competence with plain and fancy hocus-pocus to make themselves masters of their fellow men. For every age, a pseudo-intellectual autocracy, guarding the tricks of the trade from the uninitiated, and running, after its own pattern, the civilization of its day.

  Fred Rodell

  Running, Jealous, Men

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• Power has to be protected from scrutiny. That's the principle of every dictatorship, of every autocracy. You hear it from high priests at Harvard and every government department, that power has to be kept secret otherwise it will fade and it won't work. But Bradley Manning is violating that principle.

  Noam Chomsky

  Government, Secret, Principles

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• They realize that in thirty-four months we have built up new instruments of public power. In the hands of a peoples Government this power is wholesome and proper. But in the hands of political puppets of an economic autocracy such power would provide shackles for the liberties of the people.

  Franklin D. Roosevelt

  Power, Government, Hands

  Roosevelt, Franklin D. (1938). “Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: F.D. Roosevelt, 1936, Volume 5”, p.16, Best Books on

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• I was interested by the idea that artists working in a totalitarian dictatorship or tsarist autocracy are secretly and slightly shamefully envied by artists who work in freedom. They have the gratification of intense interest: the authorities want to put them in jail, while there are younger readers for whom what they write is pure oxygen.

  Tom Stoppard

  Writing, Artist, Oxygen

  "'You can't help being what you write'". Interview with Maya Jaggi, www.theguardian.com. September 5, 2008.

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• The deadliest foe of democracy is not autocracy but liberty frenzied. Liberty is not foolproof. For its beneficent working it demands self-restraint, a sane and clear recognition of the practical and attainable, and of the fact that there are laws of nature which are beyond our power to change.

  Otto Hermann Kahn

  Self, Law, Democracy

  Otto Hermann Kahn (1918). “Frenzied liberty: the myth of "a rich man's war"”

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• As so often before, liberty has been wounded in the house of its friends.

  Otto Hermann Kahn

  House, Liberty, Twin Brother

  Otto Hermann Kahn (1918). “Frenzied Liberty: The Myth of "a Rich Man's War"”

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• As so often before, liberty has been wounded in the house of its friends. Liberty in the wild and freakish hands of fanatics has once more, as frequently in the past, proved the effective helpmate of autocracy and the twin-brother of tyranny.

  Otto Hermann Kahn

  Brother, Freedom, Past

  Otto Hermann Kahn (1918). “Frenzied Liberty: The Myth of "a Rich Man's War"”

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• And who can suffer injury by just taxation, impartial laws and the application of the Jeffersonian doctrine of equal rights to all and special privileges to none? Only those whose accumulations are stained with dishonesty and whose immoral methods have given them a distorted view of business, society and government. Accumulating by conscious frauds more money than they can use upon themselves, wisely distribute or safely leave to their children, these denounce as public enemies all who question their methods or throw a light upon their crimes.

  William Jennings Bryan

  Light, Enemy, Bankers

  Speech at Madison Square Garden, New York, August 30, 1906.

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• Take a look at the police and how they treat you,
  Take a look at these corporations that cheat you.
  Democrats and Republicans are all see-through.
  Now we votin for the lesser of two evils...
  Man, don't let 'em deceive you.
  This is an autocracy, not a democracy,
  But to call this a democracy without mock interest
  In the laws of society? That's called hypocrisy.

  KRS-One

  Rap, Men, Law

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