Top 241 Despotism Quotes & Sayings

Despotism and freedom of the press cannot exist together.

An elective despotism was not the government we fought for.

Socialism is the phantastic younger brother of despotism, which it wants to inherit. Socialism wants to have the fullness of state force which before only existed in despotism. ... However, it goes further than anything in the past because it aims at the formal destruction of the individual ... who ... can be used to improve communities by an expedient organ of government.

Every State is a despotism, be the despot one or many.

Fear must rule in a despotism.

The despotism of will in ideas is styled plan, project, character, obstinacy; its despotism in desires is called passion.

Despotism can do without faith but freedom cannot.

But sea power has never led to despotism. The nations that have enjoyed sea power even for a brief period-Athens, Scandinavia, the Netherlands, England, the United States-are those that have preserved freedom for themselves and have given it to others. Of the despotism to which unrestrained military power leads we have plenty of examples from Alexander to Mao.

The despotism of custom is everywhere the standing hindrance to human advancement.

Despotism may be able to do without religion, but democracy cannot.

Despotism subjects a nation to one tyrant; democracy, to many.

It has been said that terror is the principle of despotic government. Does your government therefore resemble despotism? Yes, as the sword that gleams in the hands of the heroes of liberty resembles that with which the henchmen of tyranny are armed ... The government of the revolution is liberty's despotism against tyranny.

Nothing renders a nation so despicable as religious despotism.

Republican despotism is more fertile in acts of tyranny, because everyone has a hand in it.

A democratic despotism is like a theocracy: it assumes its own correctness.

Despotism is a long crime.

Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism.

The strength and power of despotism consists wholly in the fear of resistance.

Military despotism represses generous sentiments, priestly tyranny stifles them.

[O]ur sages in the great [constitutional] convention... intended our government should be a republic which differs more widely from a democracy than a democracy from a despotism. The rigours of a despotism often... oppress only a few, but it is the very essence and nature of a democracy, for a faction claiming to oppress a minority, and that minority the chief owners of the property and truest lovers of their country.

War lives on despotism and is not waged with God's love.

I do not want history to record me as someone who has bequeathed to his nation the institution of despotism.

Democracy has two excesses to avoid: the spirit of inequality, which leads to an aristocracy, or to the government of a single individual; and the spirit of extreme equality, which conducts it to despotism, as the despotism of a single individual finishes by conquest.

Man is insatiable for power; he is infantile in his desires and, always discontented with what he has, loves only what he has not. People complain of the despotism of princes; they ought to complain of the despotism of man.

Liberty begets anarchy, anarchy leads to despotism, and despotism brings about liberty once again. Millions of human beings have perished without being able to make any of these systems triumph.

Is not liberty the destruction of all despotism - including, of course, legal despotism?

The progress of despotism tends to disappoint its own purpose.

Democracy passes into despotism.

If there is one fact we really can prove, from the history that we really do know, it is that despotism can be a development, often a late development and very often indeed the end of societies that have been highly democratic. A despotism may almost be defined as a tired democracy. As fatigue falls on a community, the citizens are less inclined for that eternal vigilance which has truly been called the price of liberty; and they prefer to arm only one single sentinel to watch the city while they sleep.

Wherever despotism abounds, the sources of public information are the first to be brought under its control.

Religions are the cradles of despotism.

Whatever crushes individuality is despotism.

Creativity doesn't flourish in an atmosphere of despotism, coercion and fear.

France was long a despotism tempered by epigrams.

We are not to expect to be translated from despotism to liberty in a featherbed.

The despotism of custom is on the wane. We are not content to know that things are; we ask whether they ought to be.

The revolutionary government is the despotism of liberty against tyranny.

Force is the vital principle and immediate parent of despotism.

Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of liberty.

The revolutionary government is the despotism of liberty against tyranny

A people among whom custom is altogether sovereign endures the despotism of the dead.

Real liberty is neither found in despotism or the extremes of democracy, but in moderate governments.

Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement.

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.

It is not because a part of the government is elective, that makes it less a despotism, if the persons so elected, possess afterwards, as a parliament, unlimited powers. Election, in this case, becomes separated from representation, and the candidates are candidates for despotism.

The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism.

Despotism isn't nearly as bad as it's cracked up to be.

Despotism sits nowhere so secure as under the effigy and ensigns of freedom.

Summation of Leviathan: "The axiom, fear; the method, logic; the conclusion, despotism."

A majority held in restraint by constitutional checks and limitations, and always changing easily with deliberate changes of popular opinions and sentiments, is the only true sovereign of a free people. Whoever rejects it does of necessity fly to anarchy or to despotism. Unanimity is impossible. The rule of a minority, as a permanent arrangement, is wholly inadmissible; so that, rejecting the majority principle, anarchy or despotism in some form is all that is left.

Despotism is unjust to everybody, including the despot, who was probably made for better things.

Equating brutality and despotism with leadership is not an American value.

It's political Daddyism and it's as old as demagogues and despotism.

No despotism is so formidable as that of a religion or a scientific system.

There was one species of despotism under which he had long groaned, and that was petticoat government.

So long as war is the main business of nations, temporary despotism - despotism during the campaign - is indispensable.

People forgot that industry is not an end in itself, but should be only a means to insure to man his material subsistence and to make accessible to him the blessings of a higher intellectual culture. Where industry is everything and man is nothing begins the realm of a ruthless economic despotism whose workings are no less disastrous than those of any political despotism.

Freedom of conscience entails more dangers than authority and despotism.

Despotism can only exist in darkness.

We are ruled by chance but never have enough patience to accept its despotism.