Jon Lee Anderson Quotes

Every one of the world's dictatorships can and does claim to be acting in the name of the people.

The passion for power over others can never cease to threaten mankind, and is always sure of finding new and unforseen allies in continuing its martyrology.

Man alone can enslave man.

Reign of blows cascading down upon your shoulders Far too many men dressed up as soldiers The lamb is brought to the ground Under the weight of the Crown A crown of thorns and dark deeds The swastika and the hammer and sickle Are symbols that reap only weeds

How did an allegedly free people spawn a vast, rampant cuttlefish of dominion with its tentacles in every orifice of the body politic?

Beware the People weeping When they bare the iron hand.

Despotism is a long crime.

If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.

Dr. Flint had sworn that he would make me suffer, to my last day, for this new crime against him, as he called it; and as long as he had me in his power he kept his word.

The love of domination and an uncontrolled lust of arbitrary power have prevailed among all nations and perhaps in proportion to the degrees of civilization.

The most monstrous men a plea of power in the history of the world

Despotism, be it financial or political, is vulnerable, unless it is believed to rest upon a moral sanction.

Even the most repressive regimes seek to maintain the fiction that they have the people’s interest at heart.

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

The art of power often involves brutality — and other offenses too.

Power on the one side, fear on the other, are always the buttresses on which irrational authority is built.

Fascism is a lie told by bullies.

History tells you if dictators are not stopped in time, they cause more damage.

Fear must rule in a despotism.

Fear has always been the driving force behind all dictators' repression.

The taint inherent in absolute power is not its inhumanity but its antihumanity.

Have you any idea how much tyrants fear the people they oppress?

Fidel Castro's legacy is one of firing squads, theft, unimaginable suffering, poverty and the denial of fundamental human rights.

Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.

There is a cowardly propensity in the human heart that delights in oppressing somebody else, and in the gratification of this base desire we always select a victim that can be outraged with safety.