Otto Hermann Kahn Quotes

I've always hated oppression.

All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.

A state of society where men may not speak their minds cannot long endure.

Then they came for me - and there was no one left to speak out for me.

Many a time freedom has been rolled back - and always for the same sorry reason: fear.

Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings.

Where liberty dies, evil grows.

Freedom can be killed by neglect as well as by direct attack.

I am a witness to nations and people deprived of their freedom. I was there. I watched that great Iron Curtain drop around nations which formerly had prized their freedom - good people. I was aghast as these were written off by the stroke of a pen.

Yes, citizens, Iturbide was a traitor, a hypocrite and an impious man who destroyed the assembly in which the people had deposited their sovereignty in order to appropriate it all to himself

Repression or oppression never yet succeeded in crushing the truth or redressing a wrong.

A heavy aristocracy and corruption are two bridles in the mouths of a people which will prevent them from making any effectual efforts against their masters.

England may as well dam up the waters of the Nile with bulrushes as to fetter the step of Freedom

the Distress of our oppressed Country, which now unjustly feels the baneful Effects of arbitrary Power.

If they come for me in the morning, they will come for you at night.

The limits of tyrants are proscribed by the endurance of those whom they suppress.

If you're going to hold someone down you're going to have to hold onto the other end of the chain. You are confined by your own system of repression.

Alas, how many have been persecuted for the wrong of having been right?

… to gag us from speaking truth, and discovering the tyrannies of bad men.

Those who sell their liberty for security are understandable, if pitiable, creatures. Those who sell the liberty of others for wealth, power, or even a moment's respite deserve only the end of a rope.

It is necessary to be very intelligent in the work of oppression.

As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged, and it is in such a twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air - however slight - lest we become unwitting victims of darkness.

Tyranny is Tyranny, let it come from whom it may.

Where there is no freedom, there is death and destruction.

… so long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men.