#tyranny

A modern democracy is a tyranny whose borders are undefined; one discovers how far one can go only by traveling in a straight line until one is stopped. ↗

— Norman Mailer

#democracy #discovers #far #go #how

Our authorities leave us no doubt that the trust lodged with the oligarchy was sometimes abused, but it certainly ought not to be regarded as a mere usurpation or engine of tyranny. ↗

— Henry James Sumner Maine

#certainly #doubt #engine #leave #lodged

It is the American vice, the democratic disease which expresses its tyranny by reducing everything unique to the level of the herd. ↗

— Henry Miller

#democratic #disease #everything #expresses #herd

Any ideal system is its own worst enemy, and as soon as you start to implement these visions of grandeur, they just fall apart and turn into a complete tyranny. ↗

— Ben Nicholson

#apart #complete #enemy #fall #grandeur

Taxation without representation is tyranny. ↗

— James Otis

#taxation #tyranny #without

Beauty is a short-lived tyranny. ↗

— George Bernard Shaw

#short-lived #tyranny

There are three things in the world that deserve no mercy, hypocrisy, fraud, and tyranny. ↗

— Frederick William Robertson

#fraud #hypocrisy #mercy #things #three

The wisest thing in the world is to cry out before you are hurt. It is no good to cry out after you are hurt; especially after you are mortally hurt. People talk about the impatience of the populace; but sound historians know that most tyrannies have been possible because men moved too late. it is often essential to resist a tyranny before it exists. ↗

— G.K. Chesterton

#men

What manner of men had lived in those days...who had so eagerly surrendered their sovereignty for a lie and a delusion? Why had they been so anxious to believe that the government could solve problems for them which had been pridefully solved, many times over, by their fathers? Had their characters become so weak and debased, so craven and emasculated, that offers of government dole had become more important than their liberty and their humanity? Had they not know that power delegated to the government becomes the club of tyrants? They must have known. They had their own history to remember, and the history of five thousand years. Yet, they had willingly and knowingly, with all this knowledge, declared themselves unfit to manage their own affairs and had placed their lives, which belonged to God only, in the hands of sinister men who had long plotted to enslave them, by wars, by "directives," by "emergencies." In the name of the American people, the American people had been made captive. ↗

— Taylor Caldwell

#freedom #politics #tyranny #freedom

Writing, as most art, is considered to be essentially superfluous. Who is an artist before a surgeon? Or a scientist? But the fact that tyrants and political forces of every age have been threatened by art again and again, condemned it as degenerate or poisonous, and have silenced, brutalized, or murdered artists because of their work only serves to illustrate how significant art is, that it is our one greatest power. I would even go so far as to say that the tyrant ‘understands’ art more than the devotee, for the latter is generally too ‘pious’ and adoring, almost like a simple-minded believer overwrought by faith who simply loves and finds everything ‘great,’ whereas the former suffers the transformative threat of art more, is even endangered by it, hence their terror. ↗

— Rainer J. Hanshe

#tyranny #age