James Farmer Quotes

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

When despots rule, cartoonists die.

One need only watch totalitarians at work to see that once men gain power over other men’s minds, that power is never used sparingly and wisely, but lavishly and brutally and with unspeakable results.

The enemies of freedom do not argue; they shout and they shoot.

Governments oppress people, but so do mobs. You need to avoid both to make progress.

The greater the state, the more wrong and cruel its patriotism, and the greater is the sum of suffering upon which its power is founded.

I've never doubted that apartheid - because it was of itself fundamentally, intrinsically evil - was going to bite the dust eventually.

Force always attracts men of low morality ... tyrants of genius are succeeded by scoundrels.

Every kind and degree of evil of which mankind are susceptible may be inflicted on them by their government.

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

America is just the country that shows how all the written guarantees in the world for freedom are no protection against tyranny and oppression of the worst kind. There the politician has come to be looked upon as the very scum of society.

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

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.

The United States is the source of evil, moral corruption, oppression, despotism, and aggression … in the world.

The one indisputable reality of dictatorship is that dissent, insult, and malevolent language do not go unpunished if it is allowed at all.

In the same way that Egypt and Libya conspired to 'disappear' my father and silence writers such as Idris Ali, they made me, too, to a far lesser extent, feel punished for speaking out.

The forces of violence and oppression don't care about the innocent.

Cruelty was the devil, and most people were, in one way or another, cruel. Tyranny, suppression, persecution, torture, slavery, war, neglect - all were cruel. The world was acid and sour with hate, fat with greed, yellow with the triumph of the strong and the rich.

Only oppression should fear the full exercise of freedom.

There are certain wicked people in the world that you can't deal with except by force.

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

Fascism is not defined by the number of its victims, but by the way it kills them.

We took this challenge before our Lord and our conscience, and it must be done, because this man, Hitler, he is the ultimate evil.

Humans are insane. We kill our own people, starve our own people, sell them, work them to death, beat them, don't give them affordable/free/good healthcare, and let them live in misery, while a few of us have - we have all we want. We are evil.

In most of history, societies have not been free. It's a very rare society that is free. The default condition of human societies is tyranny.