Albert Camus Quotes

I ask myself what is a dictator? I don't understand. It is some kind of terrible person, a bad person. But I am not frightening. I am not a bad person at all.

Brutal men with unlimited power are the same all over the world.

Napoleon - the people who were becoming Napoleon's generals realized that for him, it was not about spreading freedom and revolution; it was about creating a new empire with Napoleon the dictator or the emperor.

Any excuse will serve a tyrant.

This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector.

... all of our human experience shows that no one with absolute power can be trusted to give it up even in part.

Oppressive government is more terrible than tigers.

De Gaulle has all the characteristics to be a dictator.

President Maliki: The appetite has grown with the eating. He has become a real dictator.

A dictator keeps control and leads. A tyrant is someone selfish who destroys.

Dictating to dictators doesn't work; they are congenitally delusional about their own indispensability.

A strength to harm is perilous in the hand of an ambitious head.

Red is a benevolent dictatorship.

All men would be tyrants if they could.

To assume all the powers is not good for anybody. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. All those experiments have a bad ending.

Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it.

Tyrants have always some slight shade of virtue; they support the laws before destroying them.

Dictators are allergic to reform, and they are cunning survivors. They will do whatever it takes to preserve their power and wealth, no matter how much blood ends up on their hands. They are master deceivers and talented manipulators who cannot be trusted to change.

A government that can at pleasure accuse, shoot, and hang men, as traitors, for the one general offence of refusing to surrender themselves and their property unreservedly to its arbitrary will, can practice any and all special and particular oppressions it pleases.

I would not like a king who could obey.

Every dictator is an enemy of freedom, an opponent of law.

The love of domination and an uncontrolled lust of arbitrary power have prevailed among all nations and perhaps in proportion to the degrees of civilization.

Napoleon is a dangerous man in a free country. He seems tome to have the makings of a tyrant, and I believe that were he to be king he would be fully capable of playing such a part, and his name would become an object of detestation to posterity...

Emperor Napoleon is nothing but an ordinary king who tramples on human rights.

I believe in benevolent dictatorships, provided I am the dictator.