Fouad Ajami Quotes
Dictators are the last to know.
Fouad Ajami, Political Scientist, CBS Evening News, January 17, 1990
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
The Priest was the right wing demagogic radio host of his day. Virulently anti-Semitic and anti-Black, he was threatened with excommunication by the Catholic Church, which finally ordered him to cease us weekly radio show and stop the political hate.
FDR was a marvelous judge of men and their character. De Gaulle could not separate himself from France and pushed the French Republic towards one man rule (himself) as much as anyone since Napoleon Bonaparte.
At the time of this statement most people thought that Bush was joking. But by the end of his Presidency many looked back on the quote and thought that Bush had such preferences. He unilaterally took the country into the Iraq War and assumed Presidential Powers that no other president had ever attempted. Most serious, his administration actually took the formal legal position that the President did not have to obey the law if he unilaterally thought that it was not in the nation’s interest from the point of view of the Commander in Chief. So many debate whether this quotation was a light hearted joke of a harbinger of his real feelings about the Presidency.
Description of the Mexican Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) which ruled Mexico for 71 straight years.
Arguing the need to limit the power of the legislature:
Historically, most dictators have announced their worst intentions and in many cases were not believed by much of the world who then learned that they had made a serious error.
Bartolo was the most famous legal expert of his day and for many years thereafter as he died at the age of 44—the height of his career. In Italy, Spain and other nations of Europe there were statutes passed that said if there was no precedent in Roman Law, the writings of Bartolo should dictate the law.
Eggleston was an accomplished writer who had served in the Confederate army of the Civil War. 20 year after the war he wrote a series of articles for the prestigious Northern Atlantic Monthly trying to convey the war from the Southerner’s point of view.
This is the argument—an essence of Fascism—of every dictator from Julius Caesar onward. See {640792} for more of his views on dictators.
Fouad A. Ajami was a MacArthur Fellowship winning, Lebanese-born American university professor and writer on Middle Eastern issues. He was a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
