Meles Zenawi Quotes

The whole administrative, judicial, and legislative machinery obeys a single will, the caprice of General Porfirio Diaz, who during his long administration has shown that the principal motive that guides him is to maintain himself in power and at any cost.

The problem of Africa in general and Uganda in particular is not the people but leaders who want to overstay in power.

Morsi has appointed himself as Egypt’s new Pharaoh.

Despotism has so often been established in the name of liberty that experience should warn us to judge parties by their practices rather than their preachings.

In primary school in south-eastern Nigeria, I was taught that Hosni Mubarak was the president of Egypt. I learned the same thing in secondary school. In university, Mubarak was still president of Egypt. I came to assume, subconsciously, that he - and others like Paul Biya in Cameroon and Muammar Gaddafi in Libya - would never leave.

The autocracies of the Arab world have been as economically destructive as they've been politically repressive.

We have a war dictator who was not elected, he snuck in. so he punishes people that threaten him in any way, or even say something he doesn't like. It has no resemblance to democracy.

Anywhere in Latin America there is a potential threat of the pathology of caudillismo and it has to be guarded against.

Moammar Gaddafi, who has called himself the 'Guide of the First of September Great Revolution of the Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya,' should go down in history with the Emperor Bokassa and Idi Amin as a grotesque reminder of why people have the right to change their government.

Dictators, unlike Democrats, depend on a small coterie to sustain their power. These backers, generally drawn from the military, the senior civil service, and family or clan members, have a synergistic relationship with their dictator. The dictator delivers opportunities for them to become rich, and they protect him from being overthrown.

Putin can't afford to leave the office because he will be in real danger of being prosecuted for things he and his people did during their stay in power.

Mobutu was mainstream Africa. Every independent African Government was a one-party state at the time. None allowed opposition. Every one of them had rent-seeking political leaders. The only thing that set Mobutu apart was how ostentatious his theft was.

The shortest way to ruin a country is to give power to demogogues.

We do not believe in government through the voting booth. The Spanish national will was never freely expressed through the ballot box.

In inner-party politics, these methods lead, as we shall yet see, to this: the party organization substitutes itself for the party, the central committee substitutes itself for the organization, and, finally, a "dictator" substitutes himself for the central committee.

Maintaining legitimacy in an authoritarian state is very difficult.

I am the first authoritarian government elected to become a dictator and then resigning as a dictator. So this is the first dictator in the world who has resigned while still quite healthy.

In Pakistan, there have been two real powers - one is Bhuttoism, and one is the worshipers of dictatorship. I call them the supporters of the establishment.

The laws of the lowly gangster govern Qaddafi and his sons.

One of the things you can learn from a figure like Venezuela's Hugo Chavez is that if you take all the resources of the state for yourself, you don't build much of a constituency and you have to rely on repression, and repression is difficult in the modern world.

Comrade Stalin, having become Secretary-General, has unlimited authority concentrated in his hands, and I am not sure whether he will always be capable of using that authority with sufficient caution.

Saddam Hussein, influenced by fascism, ordered the deaths of tens of thousands of people, fought two disastrous wars, turned his nation into an international pariah and ruined his country’s economy. In other words, his record is identical to George W. Bush’s.

I applaud strong government, but not overweening government sustained by cronies, ciphers and a personality cult.

Donald Trump gives the impression that he would like to govern by decree. He has that impulse in him and he wants to be a savior, so he says, in his famous phrase, "Only I can fix it!" That's a strange and weird statement for anybody to make, but it's central to Trump's sense of self and self-presentation. And I think that has a lot to do with his identification with dictators. No matter how many they kill and no matter what else they do, they have this capacity to rule by decree without any interference by legislators or courts.

Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi grabbed full power for himself. Not even the pharaohs had so much authority, to say nothing of his predecessor Hosni Mubarak. This is a catastrophe - it a mockery of the revolution that brought him to power and an act that leads one to fear the worst.