Edmund Burke Quotes

Military dictatorship, you can focus on it, you can fight it directly. It's a band of power-driven people.

Since Castro took power, the Cuban people have been denied basic human freedoms. No freedom of religion, no freedom of the press, no political freedom. And the regime uses brutality and violence to suppress these freedoms and impose its will.

Dictator, n. An evil man who maintains power by intimidation and force, refusing to obey the United States.

You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police. Yet in their hearts there is unspoken – unspeakable fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts!

Every dictatorship creates thousands of smaller dictators who live on for decades.

Witness the tragic condition of Russia. The methods of State centralization have paralyzed individual initiative and effort; the tyranny of the dictatorship has cowed the people into slavish submission and all but extinguished the fires of liberty; organized terrorism has depraved and brutalized the masses and stifled every idealistic aspiration; institutionalized murder has cheapened human life, and all sense of the dignity of man and the value of life has been eliminated; coercion at every step has made effort bitter, labor a punishment, has turned the whole of existence into a scheme of mutual deceit, and has revived the lowest and most brutal instincts of man.

All tyrannies are virtuoso displays, over many years, of cunning, risk-taking, terror, delusion, narcissism, showmanship, and charm, distilled into a spectacle of total personal control.

Any dictatorship would be better than modern democracy. There cannot be so incompetent a dictator, that he would show more stupidity than a majority of the people. Best dictatorship would be one where lots of heads would roll and government would prevent any economical growth.

A law is always that much more scary and that much more effective for a totalitarian state if it's selectively enforced.

As a rule, dictatorships guarantee safe streets and terror of the doorbell. In democracy the streets may be unsafe after dark, but the most likely visitor in the early hours will be the milkman.

The death of dictator Kim Jong-Il has cast all eyes on North Korea, a country without literature or freedom or truth.

I hate Iran. I hate the Iranian government. It's a cruel and evil government.

Assure a man that he has a soul and then frighten him with old wives' tales as to what is to become of him afterward, and you have hooked a fish, a mental slave.

Remember that this White house is populated with … control freaks.

They (who) seek to establish systems of government based on the regimentation of all human beings by a handful of individual rulers … call this a new order. It is not new and it is not order.

The man whom events had elevated to the position of dictator tirelessly must have been aspiring to power himself, energetically pushing aside and crushing ruthlessly all who stood in his way

We [Arabs] export not only oil but techniques and tools of torture. Our states, run by ministries of the interior and the security services, are regimes bereft of legitimacy and based on violations of dignity and human rights.

Our political life is closed, and our freedoms usurped, and our people are oppressed, and fearful… if you don’t say what the ruler wants, you’re exiled beyond the sun.

… the greatest tyrant in the world; the greatest terrorist in the world.

The rule of several bad men does not last long, and easily decays to the rule of a single tyrant.

When despots rule, cartoonists die.

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.

To live under a tyranny is to live without high thought, a life worse than the animals, for what is tyranny but a government framed with the express object of making men so base and vile that they do not know whether they are awake or asleep in the world?

Fig leaves of democratic procedure … hide the nakedness of Stalinist dictatorship

We have tended to be comfortable with authoritarian regimes.