Kenneth Minogue Quotes

Despotism has so often been established in the name of liberty that experience should warn us to judge parties by their practices rather than their preachings.

Oppressive government is more terrible than tigers.

Despotism sits nowhere so secure as under the effigy and ensigns of freedom.

A collective tyrant, spread over the length and breadth of the land, is no more acceptable than a single tyrant ensconced on his throne.

Every tyrant who has lived has believed in freedom for himself.

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

This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector.

I admit that what you have just heard might be for the welfare of the country, were it not that the presence of despotism are always dangerous.

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.

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

In domestic as in political tyranny, the case of absolute monsters chiefly illustrates the institution by showing that there is scarcely any horror which may not occur under it if the despot pleases

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

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.

Some of the defendants say that dictatorship can be good if there is a good dictator. But I say that a man cannot stay good if he becomes a dictator. Authoritarianism is a system that destroys man's morality. If you take a saint and give him power, he will change into a Hitler or a devil.

Stalin could occasionally make Hitler look like a Boy Scout.

I would be opposed to any kind of totalitarian control.

A dictator keeps control and leads. A tyrant is someone selfish who destroys.

Fear must rule in a despotism.

If you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him in absolute power, within a year he would be worse than the Tsar himself.

A police state is a country run by criminals

If you will not have God (and He is a jealous God), you should pay your respects to Hitler or Stalin.

A nation ignorant of the equal benefits of liberty and law, must be awed by the flashes of arbitrary power: the cruelty of a despot will assume the character of justice; his profusion, of liberality; his obstinacy, of firmness.

Despotism is unjust to everybody, including the despot, who was probably made for better things.

It can't happen here is always wrong: a dictatorship can happen anywhere.