#dictatorship

Without a sound legal system, a small group or even a single person can take control of an entire country. ↗

— Ji Li Jiang

#dictatorship #dictatorship

Generalization is flawed thinking only when applied to individuals. It is the most accurate way to describe the mass, the Wad. And yours is a democracy, a dictatorship of the Wad. ↗

— Trevanian

#generalizations #politics #dictatorship

By placing confidence in violent means, one has chosen the very type of struggle with which the oppressors nearly always have superiority. ↗

— Gene Sharp

#dictatorship

Terrorism works better as a tactic for dictatorships, or for would-be dictators, than for revolutionaries. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#revolution #revolutionary #state-terrorism #terrorism #dictatorship

The true essence of a dictatorship is in fact not its regularity but its unpredictability and caprice; those who live under it must never be able to relax, must never be quite sure if they have followed the rules correctly or not. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#dictatorship #fascism #rules #dictatorship

If only the right person would have to leave, everyone else would be able to stay in the country. ↗

— Herta Müller

#immigration #dictatorship

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