Aeschylus Quotes

Death is a better, milder fate than tyranny

Give the peasants neither life nor death.

Often an entire city has suffered because of an evil man.

As for us, during twenty years' reign, we have known much bitterness.

The worst evils which mankind has ever had to endure were inflicted by bad governments.

Nothing has been left undone by the enemies of freedom. Every art and artifice, every cruelty and outrage has been practiced and perpetrated to destroy the rights of man. In this great struggle, every crime has been rewarded and every virtue has been punished.

The evils of tyranny are rarely seen but by him who resists it.

Not the torturer will scare me, nor the body's final fall, nor the barrels of death's rifles, nor the shadows on the wall, nor the night when to the ground the last dim star of pain, is hurled but the blind indifference of a merciless, unfeeling world.

In a free country there is much clamor with little suffering; in a despotic state there is little complaint, but much suffering.

If slavery, barbarism and desolation are to be called peace, men can have no worse misfortune.

Man’s inhumanity to man Makes countless thousands mourn!

His perfect kingdom of killing, suffering and pain Demands devotion, atrocities done in his name.

Fear of death has been the greatest ally of tyranny past and present.

Conquerors never, never conquer a nation to bring freedom. They brought control.

Five or six hundred heads cut off would have assured your repose, freedom and happiness.

Let tyrants shake their iron rod.

Human beings may well be unable to break free of the dictatorship of greed that spreads like a miasma over the world, but no longer will we be an inarticulate and ignorant humanity, confused by our enslavement to superior cruelty and weaponry.

Man is subject to innumerable pains and sorrows by the very condition of humanity, and yet, as if nature had not sown evils enough in life, we are continually adding grief to grief and aggravating the common calamity by our cruel treatment of one another.

The possession of arbitrary power has always, the world over, tended irresistibly to destroy humane sensibility, magnanimity, and truth.

To some extent I liken slavery to death.

Oh eyes, no eyes, but fountains fraught with tears; O life, no life, but lively form of death; Oh world, no world, but mass of public wrongs.

A slave government is an oligarchy; and one, too, of the most arbitrary and criminal character.

Life without Liberty is far worse than death.

We cannot live by power, and a culture that seeks to live by it becomes brutal and sterile. But we can die without it.

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