Dictatorship Quotes - Page 3

• You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police ... yet in their hearts there is unspoken fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts: words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home -- all the more powerful because forbidden -- terrify them. A little mouse of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic.

  Winston Churchill

  Powerful, Fear, Home

  "The Defence of Freedom and Peace (The Lights are Going Out)", radio broadcast to the United States and to London, October 16, 1938.

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• The worship of the golden calf of old (cf. Ex 32:15-34) has found a new and heartless image in the cult of money and the dictatorship of an economy which is faceless and lacking any truly humane goal.

  Pope Francis

  Goal, Heartless, Golden

  Pope Francis' Address to the New Non-Resident Ambassadors to the Holy See: Kyrgyzstan, Antigua and Barbuda, Luxembourg and Botswana, w2.vatican.va. May 16, 2013.

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• We have to implant democracies where there are now dictatorships.

  Tom Tancredo

  Democracy, Implants

  Interview with John Hawkins, rightwingnews.com. February 26, 2012.

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• No one should suffer from the great delusion that any form of communism or socialism which promotes the dictatorship of the few instead of the initiative of the millions can produce a happier or more prosperous society.

  Charles E. Wilson

  Suffering, Socialism, Communism

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• History provides many examples of democracy crushed by people who said to be the champion of "genuine democracy" and "the people's real meaning". The realization about this may lead us to a defence position that conceals that democracy is an extraordinarily demanding way of rule. It must constantly find new ways to revitalize, to reach out to people and make them active. Dictatorships offers a machinery of obedience, closed and externally well-oiled. Democracy is based on fairness, openness and pulsating life. Therefore it must constantly be won again.

  Olof Palme

  Real, People, Champion

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• A totalitarian dictatorship cannot explain; it can only suppress.

  Robert Payne

  Robert Payne (1975). “The Corrupt Society: From Ancient Greece to Present-Day America”, Praeger Publishers

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• The class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat.

  Karl Marx

  Struggle, Class, World

  Letter to Joseph Weydemeyer, 5 Mar. 1852.

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• The only tyrant I accept in this world is the still voice within.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Faith, Freedom, Acceptance

  Mahatma Gandhi (1965). “Glorious Thoughts of Gandhi: Being a Treasury of about Ten Thousand Valuable and Inspiring Thougths of Mahatma Gandhi, Classified Under Four Hundred Subjects”

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• It is remarkable how easily children and grown-ups adapt to living in a dictatorship organised by lunatics.

  A. N. Wilson

  Children, Remarkable, Organised

  "Once upon a life" by A. N. Wilson, www.theguardian.com. June 4, 2011.

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• History proves that all dictatorships, all authoritarian forms of government are transient. Only democratic systems are not transient. Whatever the shortcomings, mankind has not devised anything superior.

  Vladimir Putin

  Government, Human Rights, Provocative

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• Every movement that seeks to enslave a country, every dictatorship or potential dictatorship, needs some minority group as a scapegoat which it can blame for the nation's troubles and use as a justification of its own demands for dictatorial powers. In Soviet Russia, the scapegoat was the bourgeoisie; in Nazi Germany, it was the Jewish people; in America, it is the businessmen.

  Ayn Rand

  Country, America, Russia

  Ayn Rand (1988). “The Ayn Rand Lexicon: Objectivism from A to Z”, p.143, Penguin

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• Dictatorship, by whatever name, is founded on the doctrine that the individual amounts to nothing; that the State is the only one that counts; and that men and women and children were put on earth solely for the purpose of serving the state.

  Harry S. Truman

  Children, Men, Names

  United States. President (1945-1953 : Truman), Harry S. Truman (1962). “Harry S. Truman: Containing the Public Messages, Speeches, and Statements of the President, 1945-53”

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• Democracies, unlike dictatorships, are forgiving and generous, but they cannot survive unless they fight.

  Jalal Talabani

  Fighting, Forgiving, Democracy

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• My personal influence in the Revolutionary Governing Council is such that the dictatorship of the proletariat is firmly established, since the masses are backing me.

  Bela Kun

  Influence, Revolutionary, Proletariat

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• I hate war... for the dictatorships it puts in the place of democracies, and for the starvation that stalks after it.

  Harry Emerson Fosdick

  Peace, Hate, War

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• Important as economic unification is for the recovery of Germany and of Europe, the German people must recognize that the basic cause of their suffering and distress is the war which the Nazi dictatorship brought upon the world.

  James F. Byrnes

  War, Recovery, Europe

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• Fascism is not the result of dictatorship.

  John T. Flynn

  Results, Fascism

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• Dictatorship is a constant lecture instructing you that your feelings, your thoughts and desires are of no account, that you are a nobody and must live as you are told by other people who desire and think for you

  Stephen Vizinczey

  Thinking, People, Feelings

  Stephen Vizinczey “Truth and Lies in Literature, A Writer's Ten Commandments: (Revised and Extended edition)”, stephenvizinczey.com

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• Those newspapers of the nation which most loudly cried dictatorship against me would have been the first to justify the beginnings of dictatorship by somebody else.

  Franklin D. Roosevelt

  Firsts, Newspapers, Justify

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• Extremism can flourish only in an environment where basic governmental social responsibility for the welfare of the people is neglected. Political dictatorship and social hopelessness create the desperation that fuels religious extremism.

  Benazir Bhutto

  Religious, Responsibility, People

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• We are building a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one's own ego and desires.
  We, however, have a different goal: the Son of God, the true man. He is the measure of true humanism. An "adult" faith is not a faith that follows the trends of fashion and the latest novelty; a mature adult faith is deeply rooted in friendship with Christ.

  Pope Benedict XVI

  Moving, Catholic, Ego

  Pope Benedict XVI's Homily during a Mass at St. Peter's Basilica before the conclave of cardinals, www.vatican.va. April 18, 2005.

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• It is true you cannot eat freedom and you cannot power machinery with democracy. But then neither can political prisoners turn on the light in the cells of a dictatorship.

  Corazon Aquino

  Peace, Light, Cells

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• The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy; the best weapon of a democracy is openness.

  Edward Teller

  Freedom, Democracy, Weapons

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• Only a free West can help the prisoners of today's left- and right-wing dictatorships.

  Barbara Amiel

  Wings, Today, West

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• The great multinationals are unwilling to face the moral and economic contradictions of their own behavior - producing in low-wage dictatorships and selling to high-wage democracies. Indeed, the striking quality about global enterprises is how easily free-market capitalism puts aside its supposed values in order to do business. The conditions of human freedom do not matter to them so long as the market demand is robust. The absence of freedom, if anything, lends order and efficiency to their operations.

  William Greider

  Order, Long, Democracy

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