A Quote by Edward Gibbon
The progress of despotism tends to disappoint its own purpose.
Related Quotes
Disappoint anyone… hell, disappoint everyone – but don’t ever disappoint yourself.
Live long enough and you'll disappoint everyone. People think you're able to help them and usually you can't. And so it becomes a process of choosing the one or two people you try hardest not to disappoint. The person in my life I am determined not to disappoint is you.
I always try to remember that I am a work in progress. It is life's journey that matters and the turns I take will determine how much progress I make. You see, I am unique in my gifts and the purpose I was created for. When I get to heaven at the end of my journey, I will not be asked what gifts He gave me, but what I did with them. Each one of us is a work in progress, with a mission and purpose to fulfill that is uniquely ours. Keep that in mind as you journey, won't you?
So long as war is the main business of nations, temporary despotism - despotism during the campaign - is indispensable.
If you can disappoint yourself as much as you love yourself and you still manage to disappoint yourself then why are you shocked when other people that you love disappoint you.
Is not liberty the destruction of all despotism - including, of course, legal despotism?
The despotism of will in ideas is styled plan, project, character, obstinacy; its despotism in desires is called passion.
Law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress.
I don't think you can talk about progress in art - movement, but not progress. You can speak of a point on a line for the purpose of locating things, but it's a horizontal line, not a vertical one.
The attachment to a rationalistic, teleological notion of progress indicates the absence of true progress; he whose life does not unfold satisfyingly under its own momentum is driven to moralize it, to set up goals and rationalize their achievement as progress.
The spirit of encroachment tends to consolidate the powers of all the departments in one, and thus to create whatever the form of government, a real despotism. A just estimate of that love of power, and proneness to abuse it, which predominates in the human heart is sufficient to satisfy us of the truth of this position.
In my experience, writing a novel tends to create its own structure, its own demands, its own language, its own ending.
Our contemporary Western society, in spite of its material, intellectual and political progress, is increasingly less conducive to mental health, and tends to undermine the inner security, happiness, reason and the capacity for love in the individual; it tends to turn him into an automaton who pays for his human failure with increasing mental sickness, and with despair hidden under a frantic drive for work and so called pleasure.
Liberty ... was a two-headed boon. There was first, the liberty of the people as a whole to determine the forms of their own government, to levy their own taxes, and to make their own laws.... There was second, the liberty of the individual man to live his own life, within the limits of decency and decorum, as he pleased -- freedom from the despotism of the majority.
A person with a clear purpose will make progress, even on the roughest road. A person with no purpose will make no progress, even on the smoothest road.
Europeans have sometimes been beguiled by a despotism that comes concealed in the seductive form of an ideal – as it did in the cases of Hitler and Stalin. This fact may remind us that the possibility of despotism is remote neither in space nor in time.
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