Despots Quotes - Page 5

• Every State is a despotism, be the despot one or many.

  Max Stirner

  States, Despotism

  Max Stirner (1993). “The Ego and His Own”, p.253, Lulu.com

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• Even despots accept the excellence of liberty. The simple truth is that they wish to keep it for themselves and promote the idea that no one else is at all worthy of it. Thus, our opinion
  of liberty does not reveal our differences but the relative value which we place on our fellow man. We can state with conviction, therefore, that a man's support for absolute government is
  in direct proportion to the contempt he feels for his country.

  Alexis de Tocqueville

  Country, Simple, Men

  "'L'Ancien Régime et la Révolution' ('The Old Regime and the Revolution')". Book by Alexis de Tocqueville, translated by Gerald Bevan. Author's Foreword, 2008.

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• Your generous part in my liberation is taken by the world for the revelation of the fact, that the United States are resolved not to allow the despots of the world to trample on oppressed humanity.

  Lajos Kossuth

  Taken, Tyrants, Humanity

  Lajos Kossuth (1853). “Select speeches, condensed and abridged by F.W. Newman”, p.24

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• Despots play their part in the works of thinkers. Fettered words are terrible words. The writer doubles and trebles the power of his writing when a ruler imposes silence on the people. Something emerges from that enforced silence, a mysterious fullness which filters through and becomes steely in the thought.

  Victor Hugo

  Writing, Play, Tyrants

  "Les misérables".

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• The peoples owe all political rights and privileges which we enjoy today in greater or lesser measure, not to the good will of their governments, but to their own strength. One need only study the history of the past three hundred years to understand by what relentless struggles every right has had to be wrested inch by inch from the despots.

  Rudolf Rocker

  Struggle, Past, Rights

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• The Principle of Tolerance, fixed once for all the realization that all knowledge is limited. It is an irony of history that at the very time when this was being worked out, there should rise, under Hitler in Germany and other tyrants elsewhere, a counter-conception: a principle of monstrous certainty. When the future looks back on the 1930's, it will think of them as a crucial confrontation of culture as I have been expounding it - the ascent of man against the throwback to the despots' belief that they have absolute certainty.

  Jacob Bronowski

  Faith, Men, Thinking

  "The Ascent of Man" (Episode 11: "Knowledge or Certainty"), 1973.

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• In historical fact, all of history's despots, combined, never managed to get things done as well as this rambunctious, self-critical civilization of free and sovereign citizens, who have finally broken free of worshipping a ruling class and begun thinking for themselves. Democracy can seem frustrating and messy at times, but it delivers.

  David Brin

  Thinking, Self, Civilization

  David Brin, Matthew Woodring Stover (2013). “Star Wars on Trial: Science Fiction And Fantasy Writers Debate the Most Popular Science Fiction Films of All Time”, p.48, BenBella Books, Inc.

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