#despot

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

#freedom #government #privileges #rights #struggle

Whatever crushes individuality is despotism. ↗

— John Stuart Mill

#individuality #liberty #tyranny #liberty

First Afghanistan, now Iraq. So who's next? Syria? North Korea? Iran? Where will it all end?' If these illegal interventions are permitted to continue, the implication seems to be, pretty soon, horror of horrors, no murderously repressive regimes might remain. ↗

— Daniel Kofman

#antiwar-movement #axis-of-evil #despotism #foreign-policy #foreign-policy-of-the-us

The control of information is something the elite always does, particularly in a despotic form of government. Information, knowledge, is power. If you can control information, you can control people. ↗

— Tom Clancy

#control #despotic #does #elite #form

Whatever government is not a government of laws, is a despotism, let it be called what it may. ↗

— Daniel Webster

#despotism #government #laws #may #whatever

Equality, rightly understood as our founding fathers understood it, leads to liberty and to the emancipation of creative differences; wrongly understood, as it has been so tragically in our time, it leads first to conformity and then to despotism. ↗

— Barry Goldwater

#been #conformity #creative #despotism #differences

The doctrine of blind obedience and unqualified submission to any human power, whether civil or ecclesiastical, is the doctrine of despotism, and ought to have no place among Republicans and Christians. ↗

— Angelina Grimke

#any #blind #blind obedience #christians #civil

Despotism is a long crime. ↗

— Victor Hugo

#despotism #long

Is not liberty the destruction of all despotism - including, of course, legal despotism? ↗

— Frederic Bastiat

#despotism #destruction #including #legal #liberty

A good constitution is infinitely better than the best despot. ↗

— Thomas B. Macaulay

#better #constitution #despot #good #infinitely