#dictator

Some foreign states will act against a dictatorship only to gain their own economic, political, or military control over the country. ↗

— Gene Sharp

#foreign-states #dictatorship

Vladimir Ilyich (Lenin), your concrete actions are completely unworthy of the ideas you pretend to hold. Is it possible that you do not know what a hostage really is — a man imprisoned not because of a crime he has committed, but only because it suits his enemies to exert blackmail on his companions? ... If you admit such methods, one can foresee that one day you will use torture, as was done in the Middle Ages. I hope you will not answer me that Power is for political men a professional duty, and that any attack against that power must be considered as a threat against which one must guard oneself at any price. This opinion is no longer held even by kings... Are you so blinded, so much a prisoner of your own authoritarian ideas, that you do not realise that being at the head of European Communism, you have no right to soil the ideas which you defend by shameful methods ... What future lies in store for Communism when one of its most important defenders tramples in this way every honest feeling? ↗

— Pyotr Kropotkin

#anarcho-communism #communism #dictatorship #freedom #lenin

[N]icht durch Reden und Majoritätsbeschlüsse werden die großen Fragen der Zeit entschiedenen [...] sondern durch Eisen und Blut. ↗

— Otto von Bismarck

#dictatorship #history #war #dictatorship

The all but unanimous judgment seems to be that we, the democracies, are just as responsible for the rise of the dictators as the dictatorships themselves, and perhaps more so. ↗

— Harry Emerson Fosdick

#dictatorship

Obviously, there must be some connection between the subordination of actual individuals and the grotesque exaltation of symbolic ones like Kim Il Sung. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#dictatorship #kim-il-sung #north-korea #psychology #subordination

The dictatorship is like an aria that never becomes an opera. ↗

— Emilia Pardo Bazán

#opera #political #dictatorship

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

— Tom Tancredo

#dictatorships #implant #now #where

I'm not a prophet, but I always thought it was natural for dictatorships to fall. I remember in 1989, two months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, had you said it was going to happen no one would have believed you. The system seemed powerful and unbreakable. Suddenly overnight it blew away like dust. ↗

— Salman Rushdie

#away #before #believed #berlin #berlin wall

I don't have any formula for ousting a dictator or building democracy. All I can suggest is to forget about yourself and just think of your people. It's always the people who make things happen. ↗

— Corazon Aquino

#always #any #building #democracy #dictator

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

#cells #democracy #dictatorship #eat #freedom