Raj Thackeray Quotes

I grew up in a dictatorship in East Africa.

To be a member of the Communist Party is to have a taste of the police state. It is a diluted taste but is bitter and unforgettable.

The North Korean regime really can control people. I think they are the best dictator in the whole planet.

Dictators must have enemies. They must have internal enemies to justify their secret police and external enemies to justify their military forces.

I lived in a dictatorship in Brazil, and I was arrested three times. I felt in my flesh what it is to live under such a regime and experience deprivation of freedom.

Nondemocratic regimes imperil the security of the world. They stay in power by controlling their populations. This control invariably requires an increasing amount of repression. To justify this repression and maintain internal stability, external enemies must be manufactured.

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

Those in possession of absolute power can not only prophesize and make their prophecies come true, but they can also lie and make their lies come true.

Former Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi and the radical Islamist mullahs ruling Iran share many similarities, but honesty and negotiating in good faith are not among them.

The U.S.S.R. was a totalitarian state in which judges and prosecutors were controlled by the ruling party. The result was injustice, oppression and corruption.

I grew up in Taiwan, which was a military dictatorship.

A totalitarian power is mainly busy in keeping itself alive.

It is evident that Qaddafi is mentally unwell. Like Richard III, he has barricaded himself within lies.

One of the reasons why Gadafy's dictatorship has managed to remain in power for so long is not just because it has shown itself to be able to exact a great deal of violence, both psychological and physical, on its people, but because it has been very successful at imposing a narrative, a story.

Europeans have sometimes been beguiled by a despotism that comes concealed in the seductive form of an ideal – as it did in the cases of Hitler and Stalin. This fact may remind us that the possibility of despotism is remote neither in space nor in time.

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

The easiest way to establish a dictatorship is to claim you are God's representative on earth.

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.

Sometimes I think that a parody of democracy could be more dangerous than a blatant dictatorship, because that gives people an opportunity to avoid doing anything about it.

If Saddam were to be replaced tomorrow he would probably be replaced with someone who's just as bad or worse than he is.

Any excuse will serve a tyrant.

Unquestionably, the world is better off without Saddam.

An oppressive government is more to be feared than a tiger.

Secrecy is the freedom tyrants dream of.

Nostalgia for dead tyrants and the longing for heroes are unhealthy, and they can result in the deification of a Saddam as easily as a Havel or Mandela.