Plato Quotes

If ... America is to become an empire, there is very little chance that it can avoid becoming a virtual dictatorship as well.

The world will not accept dictatorship or domination.

History proves that all dictatorships, all authoritarian forms of government are transient. Only democratic systems are not transient. Whatever the shortcomings, mankind has not devised anything superior.

It is from weakness that people reach for dictators and concentrated government power. Only the strong can be free. And only the productive can be strong.

One Hundred and Seventy Three Despots would surely be as oppressive as one.

There is no such thing as a liberal dictatorship, because a dictator just cannot afford to be liberal.

Whenever you have an efficient government you have a dictatorship.

To trample democracy with one’s feet and to give power to a single man over almost eighty million people is so terrible that one can very probably tremble over the events which will come here.

Politics without responsibility IS fascism.

It's not up to one individual to decide, 'I'm going to dictate the outcome of what's going to happen legislatively.' That is not a democracy; it's an atrocity.

A democratic despotism is like a theocracy: it assumes its own correctness.

An oppressive government is more to be feared than a tiger.

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

Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.

Tyranny is always better organized than freedom.

Red is a benevolent dictatorship.

I am the government.

It's time to bury the unreal, failed 'realism' of those who have long thought that dictators brought stability.

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

Dictatorship naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme liberty.

Dictators free themselves, but they enslave the people.

Republics decline into democracies and democracies degenerate into despotisms.

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.

You can't become a dictator through checks and balances.

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.