#dictators

American presidents always avoid shaking hands with brutal dictators, except when it's advantageous to do so. ↗

— Elizabeth A. Sherman

#always #american #avoid #brutal #dictators

I was interested by the idea that artists working in a totalitarian dictatorship or tsarist autocracy are secretly and slightly shamefully envied by artists who work in freedom. They have the gratification of intense interest: the authorities want to put them in jail, while there are younger readers for whom what they write is pure oxygen. ↗

— Tom Stoppard

#authorities #autocracy #dictatorship #envied #freedom

The revolution is a dictatorship of the exploited against the exploiters. ↗

— Fidel Castro

#against #dictatorship #exploited #revolution

Withholding information is the essence of tyranny. Control of the flow of information is the tool of the dictatorship. ↗

— Bruce Coville

#control #dictatorship #information #tyranny #information

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

#dictators #illiteracy #reading #censorship

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

— Tom Tancredo

#dictatorships #implant #now #where

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

We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one's own ego and one's own desires. ↗

— Joseph Ratzinger

#certain #desires #dictatorship #does #ego

Maintain democracy or go to dictatorship: that is what is at stake in these elections. ↗

— Mario Vargas Llosa

#dictatorship #elections #go #maintain #stake

You can't pay for healthcare if we're sending a trillion dollars a year to dictators. ↗

— Brian Schweitzer

#dollars #healthcare #pay #sending #trillion