Dictator Quotes - Page 24

• We should say to the West: "You have been supporting dictators for too many years. Don't expect the people to introduce democracy over night. It is going to take time." It took time with the French revolution, it took time with the Eastern European revolutions. And it is going to take time there.

  Tariq Ramadan

  Night, Years, People

  "'You Want My Reaction? You Get My Silence'". Interview with Lars Mensel and Clemens Lukitsch, www.theeuropean-magazine.com. November 19, 2012.

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• I don't think we should take the emotional reactions of a few people as more representative than those of the millions of people who took to the street in a non-violent way against dictators.

  Tariq Ramadan

  Emotional, Thinking, People

  "'You Want My Reaction? You Get My Silence'". Interview with Lars Mensel and Clemens Lukitsch, www.theeuropean-magazine.com. November 19, 2012.

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• I think there's evil on both sides [of Syria], and I think that's one reason I don't want to be involved in civil war. I see things in personal terms. I just can't see sending one of my sons - or your son or daughter - to fight in a civil war, where on one side we have a dictator, who in all likelihood gassed his people.

  Rand Paul

  Daughter, War, Fighting

  Source: www.wbur.org

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• China is not a great idea: capitalism and a dictator. It's like the two worst possible things you could imagine together. It's a very bad idea.

  Fran Lebowitz

  Ideas, Two, Together

  "The Voice: Fran Lebowitz". Interview with Francesco Clemente, www.interviewmagazine.com. March 11, 2016.

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• In the exhibition at Galerie Perrotin, they have the Sarajevo painting - I think it's very good to nail down this story of Pol Pot and other people, not all dictators but most of them.

  Erro

  Thinking, People, Nails

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Clearly North Korea is a very strange situation because it is such an isolated country run by a handful of dictators, or maybe just one, who seems to be somewhat paranoid. And, who had nuclear weapons.

  Bernie Sanders

  Running, Country, Korea

  Bernie Sanders during Democratic Presidential Candidates Debate at the University of New Hampshire in Durham, New Hampshire, www.nytimes.com. February 5, 2016.

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• There's a long history in the Middle East of "bread intifadas," starting with 1977 in Egypt, when Anwar Sadat tried to lift bread subsidies. People rebelled and poured into Tahrir Square, shouting slogans against the government just like they did earlier this year. Sadat learned his lesson and kept bread subsidies in place, and so did a host of other Middle Eastern dictators - many of whom were propped up for years by the West, partly through subsidized American wheat.

  Annia Ciezadlo

  Government, Egypt, Years

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Migration was not the only unpleasant experience I went though. I was born and lived in a country ruled by a brutal dictator whose wars never ended, and from an early age I was passionate about understanding the world through knowledge.

  Hassan Blasim

  Country, War, Understanding

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• While I was studying film at the Academy, the problems started. I wasn't a political activist directly in the time of Saddam [Hussein], because the dictator was so cruel and brutal that no one could criticize or complain. I felt futile and empty. The only solution in Iraq was to run away.

  Hassan Blasim

  Running, Iraq, Political

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Only force rules. Force is the first law

  Adolf Hitler

  Military, Law, Firsts

  Adolf Hitler (1944). “Hitler's Words: Two Decades of National Socialism, 1923-1943”

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• Alternatively, suppose Qaddafi winds up hanging from a lamppost in his favorite party dress. If you're a Third World dictator, what lessons would you draw? Qaddafi was the thug who came in from the cold, the one who (in the wake of Saddam's fall) renounced his nuclear program and was supposedly rehabilitated in the chancelleries of the West. He was a strong partner in the war on terrorism, according to U.S. diplomats. And what did Washington do? They overthrew him anyway.

  Mark Steyn

  Strong, War, Party

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• The National Security Agency’s capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide. If a dictator ever took over, the N.S.A. could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back.

  Frank Church

  Fighting, Agency, People

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• Fashion designers are dictators of taste.

  Karl Lagerfeld

  Fashion, Taste, Designer

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• Antisemitism is unique among religious hatreds. It is a racist conspiracy theory fashioned for the needs of messianic and brutal rulers, as dictators from the Tsars to the Islamists via the Nazis have shown. Many other alleged religious 'hatreds' are not hatreds in the true sense. If I criticise Islamic, Orthodox Jewish or Catholic attitudes towards women, for instance, and I'm accused of being a bigot, I shrug and say it is not bigoted to oppose bigotry.

  Nick Cohen

  Religious, Attitude, Islamic

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• Sometimes it's better to have a benign dictator than a dumb democracy, to be honest.

  Serj Tankian

  Dumb, Democracy, Honest

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• Nobody ever recommended a dictatorship aiming at ends other than those he himself approved. He who advocates dictatorship always advocates the unrestricted rule of his own will

  Ludwig von Mises

  Ends, Dictatorship, Approved

  Ludwig Von Mises (1985). “Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and Total War”, Libertarian Press

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• Our greatest leaders are neither dreamers nor dictators: They are, like Jefferson, those who articulate national aspirations yet master the mechanics of influence and know when to depart from dogma.

  Jon Meacham

  Leader, Dreamer, Dogma

  Jon Meacham (2012). “Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power”, p.20, Random House

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• When I touched my hand against the Western Wall and placed my prayer between its ancient stones, I thought of all the centuries that the children of Israel had longed to return to their ancient homeland. When I went to Sderot and saw the daily struggle to survive in the eyes of an eight-year-old boy who lost his leg to a Hamas rocket, and when I walked among the Hall of Names at Yad Vashem, I was reminded of the existential fear of Israelis when a modern dictator seeks nuclear weapons and threatens to wipe Israel off the face of the map - face of the Earth.

  Barack Obama

  Prayer, Children, Wall

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• The technocrat is the natural friend of the dictator—computers and dictatorship; but the revolutionary lives in the gap which separates technical progress from social totality, and inscribed there his dream of permanent revolution. This dream, therefore, is itself action, reality, and an effective menace to all established order; it renders possible what it dreams about.

  Gilles Deleuze

  Dream, Reality, Order

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• The truth is that many people set rules to keep from making decisions. Not me. I don't want to be a manager or a dictator. I want to be a leader-and leadership is ongoing, adjustable, flexible, and dynamic. As such, leaders have to maintain a certain amount of discretion

  Mike Krzyzewski

  Volleyball, People, Decision

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• Politics is when you say you are going to do one thing while intending to do another. Then you do neither what you said nor what you intended.

  Saddam Hussein

  Leader, Hussein, Said

  "Irrational, illogical, unpredictable - 24 years on, the world awaits Saddam's next move" by Ewen MacAskill, www.theguardian.com. March 18, 2003.

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• As centuries of dictators have known, an illiterate crowd is the easiest to rule; since the craft of reading cannot be untaught once it has been acquired, the second-best recourse is to limit its scope.

  Alberto Manguel

  Reading, Crafts, Crowds

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• The people who know God well—mystics, hermits, prayerful people, those who risk everything to find God—always meet a lover, not a dictator.

  Richard Rohr

  People, Risk, Lovers

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• It's a mistake to think that poor people get the benefit from the welfare system. It's a total fraud. Most welfare go to the rich of this country: the military-industrial complex, the bankers, the foreign dictators, it's totally out of control... This idea that the government has services or goods that they can pass on is a complete farce. Governments have nothing. They can't create anything, they never have. All they can do is steal from one group and give it to another at the destruction of the principles of freedom, and we ought to challenge that concept.

  Ron Paul

  Country, Military, Mistake

  Television interview, 1987.

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• America has not dictated to other nations. We have freed other nations from dictators.

  Mitt Romney

  America, Nations

  Final Presidential Debate, www.npr.org. October 23, 2012.

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