Dictators Quotes

“As centuries of dictators have known, an illiterate crowd is the easiest to rule; since the craft of reading cannot be untaught once it has been acquired, the second-best recourse is to limit its scope.”
― Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading

“This light of history is pitiless; it has a strange and divine quality that, luminous as it is, and precisely because it is luminous, often casts a shadow just where we saw a radiance; out of the same man it makes two different phantoms, and the one attacks and punishes the other, the darkness of the despot struggles with the splendor of the captain. Hence a truer measure in the final judgment of the nations. Babylon violated diminishes Alexander; Rome enslaved diminishes Caesar; massacred Jerusalem diminishes Titus. Tyranny follows the tyrant. Woe to the man who leaves behind a shadow that bears his form.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“Is is true that dictators never dream because they can change their smallest fantasies into realities if they want to?”
― Alfred De Musset, Lorenzaccio

“Laws become fragile under the influence of dictators.”
― Wayne Gerard Trotman

“Jarret insists on being a throwback to some earlier, “simpler” time. Now does not suit him. Religious tolerance does not suit him. The current state of the country does not suit him. He wants to take us all back to some magical time when everyone believed in the same God, worshipped him in the same way, and understood that their safety in the universe depended on completing the same religious rituals and stomping anyone who was different. There was never such a time in this country. But these days when more than half the people in the country can’t read at all, history is just one more vast unknown to them.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Talents

“The principle of compulsory service, embodied in the system of conscription, lias been the means by which modem dictators and military gangs have shackled their people after a coup d'état, and bound them to their own aggressive purposes. In view of the great service that conscription has rendered to tyranny and war, it is fundamentally shortsighted for any liberty-loving and peace-desiring peoples to maintain it as an imagined safeguard, lest they become the victims of the monster they have helped to preserve.”
― B.H. Liddell Hart, The Revolution in Warfare.

“Kadafi is a zombie in a pillbox hat, that's what he is!”
― Bill Maher

“The lesson we are indebted to Egypt for, our future generations learned that in the face of oppression silence is never golden.”
― Aysha Taryam, The Opposite of Indifference: A Collection of Commentaries

“Democracies, as we know, are prone to every error from incompetence and corruption to misguided fetishes and gridlock. Therefore, it is astonishing, in a sense, that we would be willing to submit the direction of our societies to the collective wisdom of an imperfect and frequently disengaged public. How could we be so naïve? To that fair question, we must reply: how could anyone be so gullible as permanently to entrust power—an inherently corrupting force—to a single leader or party? When a dictator abuses his authority, there is no legal way to stop him. When a free society falters, we still have the ability--through open debate and the selection of new leaders--to remedy those shortcomings. We still have time to pick a better egg. That is democracy's comparative advantage, and it should be recognized and preserved.”
― Madeleine K. Albright, Fascism: A Warning

“Times will come when a man of peace must go to war to secure the peace.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“The first people a dictator puts in jail are the writers, the teachers, the librarians - because these people are dangerous. They have enough vocabulary to recognize injustice and to speak out loudly about it. Let us have the courage to go on being dangerous people.”
― Madeleine L'Engle

“Books and all forms of writing have always been objects of terror to those who seek to suppress truth.”
― Wole Soyinka, The Man Died: The Prison Notes of Wole Soyinka

“What war is ever really won?”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“Stalin and Kim made human idols of themselves because they believed, as utopian idealists always do, in the ultimate goodness of themselves and the unchallengeable rightness of their decisions. There was no higher power, and so there could be no higher law. If people disagreed with them, it was because those people were in some way defective--insane, malignant, or mercenary. The rulers could not tolerate actual religion, because they could not tolerate any rival authority or any rival source or judge of goodness, gratitude, and justice.”
― Peter Hitchens

“The brisk night had put a good chill into the concrete floor, and Mussolini’s corpse had stayed nice and cool throughout the night.

His decomposition state had been arrested, and all the flies had flown away to other places. After two men dug his grave the next morning, they buried Benito Mussolini in the Musocco Cemetery on the north side of town.

— Watering Cans”
― Stephen Deck, Land of the Story Tellers: 24 Stories and 7 Poems

“Men of war will always create narratives that serve to justify the unjustifiable horrors of terror unleashed. And a man of peace will know that to argue the narrative is to further feed that narrative in the minds of those who created it, thereby heightening the horrors that those narratives justify. Therefore, a man of peace must destroy the narrative by utilizing the very horrors that they justify.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“Propaganda is a man’s strategy to hold himself out as the righteous person he is not.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“All egos are on a collision course.”
― Anthony T. Hincks

“Dictators, their cronies and suspect companies are the only ones who benefit from a closed circle.”
― Anthony T. Hincks

“All of us stand on the edge of the end of humanity.
On one side is a comfortable lifestyle and the turn the blind eye attitude to what is truly happening in and to the world.
On the other side, is a life of hardship which means, less mod-cons, less every day luxuries, maybe less food, sharing of what we do have etc.
We can't have both in today's world because man has screwed up what chance we did have.
There is no 50/50, 80/20 or even 80/20.
We choose one way or the other.
One way is that we keep on doing what we are doing and make this world uninhabitable for all of our children.
Or we can bite the bullet and start thinking of what we can do for our children and their children.
The choice is yours, but what will you say to your children besides, "sorry".
It will be hard to choose because we are all greedy for what we have, but what about our children who won't have that choice?”
― Anthony T. Hincks

“If you plan on starting a war ‘without,’ be advised that such a choice will only serve to increase the war ‘within.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“Earlier, I cited Oswald Spengler’s chilling century-old prophecy that “the era of individualism, liberalism and democracy, of humanitarianism and freedom, is nearing its end. The masses will accept with resignation the victory of the Caesars, the strong men, and will obey them.” This is the real danger posed by Putin: that he will be a model for other national leaders who want to retain their grip on power indefinitely, despite political and legal constraints.”
― Madeleine K. Albright, Fascism: A Warning

“...I am in love with freedom and that it is an affair of long standing and that it is a fine state to be in, and that I am deeply suspicious of people who are beginning to adjust to fascism and dictators merely because they are succeeding in war. From such adaptable natures a smell rises. I pinch my nose.”
― E.B. White

“The Straw Dolls by Stewart Stafford

After surrender's pin-drop grief,
Came a nihilistic jackboot slope,
Replaced with twisting blades,
As you dangle on a slippery rope.

Everything secure now ashes,
A blind road ahead lies shunning,
Every pillar of society smashed,
In whipped despotic slumming.

Fleeting daydreams of rebellion,
They'll cut those ideas from you,
Violence begetting violence now,
The bloodied crown turned blue.

© Stewart Stafford, 2023. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford

“Communists condemn blind belief. Yet, information blackout by all communist states shows reliance on a a bizarre blind belief - If you turn off the lights, nobody can hear the gossip.”
― R. N. Prasher

“I am afraid and therefore unquestioningly obedient.”
― Vaclav Havel, The Power of the Powerless

“There is no leader who has remained in power for too long and has not morally decayed, who has not become involved in violence against opponents, who has not become a demon, who has not become a fox, who has not become excessively rich, who has not become excessively autocratic, who has not become extraordinarily arrogant and spoiled, who has not become hostile to freedom, who has won the love of an entire nation to the extent of wandering the streets without bodyguards around him.”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“I guess that if you're afraid of a little opposition, then you're not the person who you portrayed yourself to be.”
― Anthony T. Hincks

“Heroes don't have an ego, but dictators do.”
― Anthony T. Hincks

“We face a dilemma. 'We' -- the intelligent model of ourselves residing in the neocortex -- are trapped. We are trapped in a body that not only is programmed to die but is largely under the control of an ignorant brute, the old brain. [...] We try to control our old brain's destructive and divisive impulses, but so far we have not been able to do this entirely. Many countries on Earth are still ruled by autocrats and dictators whose motivations are largely driven by their old brain: wealth, sex, and alpha-male-type dominance. The populist movements that support autocrats are also based on old-brain traits such as racism and xenophobia.”
― Jeff Hawkins, A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence