A Quote by C. S. Lewis

'Useful,' and 'necessity' was always 'the tyrant's plea'.

C. S. Lewis

Quote Topics

Always Necessity Plea Tyrant Useful

Quote Author

C. S. Lewis
British - Writer
November 29, 1898 - November 22, 1963

Was not necessity the plea of every illegal exertion of power or exercise of oppression?...Necessity is the plea for very infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.

William Pitt

I think I sound like a fella who's always making a plea through his music. Sort of a plea of sincerity.

Tony Martin

The plea of necessity, that eternal argument of all conspirators.

William Henry Harrison

The right of a nation to kill a tyrant, in cases of necessity, can no more be doubted, than to hang a robber, or kill a flea. But killing one tyrant only makes way for worse, unless the people have sense, spirit and honesty enough to establish and support a constitution guarded at all points against the tyranny of the one, the few, and the many.

John Adams

A man like me cannot live without a hobby-horse, a consuming passion - in Schiller's words a tyrant. I have found my tyrant, and in his service I know no limits. My tyrant is psychology. It has always been my distant, beckoning goal and now since I have hit upon the neuroses, it has come so much the nearer.

Sigmund Freud

The hand of Vengeance found the Bed To which the Purple Tyrant fled The iron hand crush'd the tyrant's head And became Tyrant in his stead.

William Blake

"Magna Carta is the Law: Let the King look out." So it has always been with tyrants among our own people: when the King was tyrant, let him look out. And it has always been the same, and will be the same, whether the tyrant be the Barons, whether the tyrant be the Church, whether he be demagogue or dictator - let them look out.

Stanley Baldwin

I understand that it is a maxim of law, that a poor plea may be a good plea to a bad declaration.

Abraham Lincoln

A plea for the spinning wheel is a plea for recognizing the dignity of labour.

Mahatma Gandhi

All the world's a stage. P.T. Barnum: It becomes a circus. But circuses or street pageants or parades have always been useful in a society.They've always been useful as a way of critiquing power. The carnivalesque has always been useful as a way of the powerful being mocked in a public space.

Kehinde Wiley

The right of a nation to kill a tyrant in case of necessity can no more be doubted than to hang a robber, or kill a flea.

John Adams

Civilization after civilization, it is the same. The world falls to tyranny with a whisper. The frightened are ever keen to bow to a perceived necessity, in the belief that necessity forces conformity, and conformity a certain stability. In a world shaped into conformity, dissidents stand out, are easily branded and dealt with. There is no multitude of perspectives, no dialogue. The victim assumes the face of the tyrant, self-righteous and intransigent, and wars breed like vermin. And people die.

Steven Erikson

Hitler had a lot of Jews high up in the hierarchy of the Third Reich. Color does not necessarily denote quality, content or value. If a black is a tyrant, he is first and foremost a tyrant, then he incidentally is black. Bush is a tyrant and if he gathers around him black tyrants, they all have to be treated as they are being treated.

Harry Belafonte

God knows that a mother needs fortitude and courage and tolerance and flexibility and patience and firmness and nearly every other brave aspect of the human soul. But because I happen to be a parent of almost fiercely maternal nature, I praise casualness. It seems to me the rarest of virtues. It is useful enough when children are small. It is useful to the point of necessity when they are adolescents.