George Soros Quotes

When there is state there can be no freedom, but when there is freedom there will be no state.

I would be opposed to any kind of totalitarian control.

Those who abhors democracy would rarely immigrate to an authoritarian state if they have to.

Whatever crushes individuality is despotism, by whatever name it may be called and whether it professes to be enforcing the will of God or the injunctions of men.

Because if you lived, as I did, several years under Nazi totalitarianism, and then 20 years in communist totalitarianism, you would certainly realize how precious freedom is, and how easy it is to lose your freedom.

Empire and liberty.

My optimism is not based primarily on the successful march of democracy in recent times but rather is based on the experience of having lived in a fear society and studied the mechanics of tyranny that sustain such a society.

Despotism can only exist in darkness, and there are too many lights now in the political firmament to permit it to remain anywhere, as it has heretofore done, almost everywhere.

Perhaps the fact that we have seen millions voting themselves into complete dependence on a tyrant has made our generation understand that to choose one's government is not necessarily to secure freedom.

Concentrated power has always been the enemy of liberty.

We do well in a country where people determine their own future. We suffer then there are dictators.

The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism –-- ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.

No matter how hard we may try to revive Democracy, to help her once more stand on her legs, to breathe life into her, all efforts will be futile. All hopes for a victory of democracy over fascism are the crassest illusions.

Which is better, to be ruled by one tyrant three thousand miles away, or by three thousand tyrants not a mile away?

Only the history of free peoples is worth our attention; the history of men under a despotism is merely a collection of anecdotes.

... a step in the direction of tyranny.

No truly sophisticated proponent of repression would be stupid enough to shatter the facade of democratic institutions.

I think that democratic communities have a natural taste for freedom: left to themselves, they will seek it, cherish it, and view any privation of it with regret. But for equality, their passion is ardent, insatiable, incessant, invincible: they call for equality in freedom; and if they cannot obtain that, they still call for equality in slavery.

Our liberty cannot depend on the good intention of those in power.

The revolutionary government is the despotism of liberty

There's nothing to fear. I'm not a dictator.

Churchill knew instinctively what was wrong with communism - that it repressed liberty; that it replaced individual discretion with state control; that it entailed the curtailment of democracy, and therefore that it was tyrannous.

Without democracy freedom is a chimera

If you are in Brazil and you grew up in a right-wing dictatorship, you think Marxism is liberating. But if you grew up in Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet Union is controlling everything and killing people, then you think capitalism is liberating. Neither of those two things are true and it doesn't take a lot brains to understand this.

Under the rule of a repressive whole, liberty can be made into a powerful instrument of domination.