Leo Tolstoy Quotes

Politicians as a class are dangerous, that people who are seeking power over us are not, by definition, our friends.

All military regimes use security as the reason why they should remain in power. It's nothing original.

Enlightened despots are mythical creatures; real despots seem more interested in stealing money or installing their sons after them.

Whoever is new to power is always harsh.

Ukraine had quite serious impact on the many Russians. They could see that ordinary people in Ukraine which is a bordering state, very close to Russia, the people of this state are, they didn't want to tolerate anymore the power abuse by Ukrainian officials.

The one thing we ought to worry about is the propensity of this country to overreact, and to engage in cycles of bitterness.

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

Despotic power is always accompanied by corruption of morality.

There's only one man really responsible for those events - Yahya Khan. Both he and his advisers were so drunk with power and corruption they'd even forgotten the honor of the army.

to tyrannize for the country is to tyrannize over the country

Tyranny and despotism can be exercised by many, more rigorously, more vigorously, and more severely, than by one.

Tyranny is Tyranny, let it come from whom it may.

Authority is God ordained, but authoritarianism and raw power, in almost all forms, is dangerous.

Despots and democratic majorities are drunk with power.

He thought of men like Hitler, Stalin, and Napoleon. All it took was a lot of seemingly decent people to put the wrong person in power and then fall under their spell.

Power tends to isolate those who hold too much of it. Eventually, they lose touch with reality ... and fall.

An autocratic system of coercion, in my opinion, soon degenerates. For force always attracts men of low morality, and I believe it to be an invariable rule that tyrants of genius are succeeded by scoundrels. For this reason I have always been passionately opposed to systems such as we see in Italy and Russia to-day.

Dictators can always consolidate their tyranny by an appeal to patriotism.

Under dictatorship, the people in prison are always superior to the people who put them there.

With the tools of democracy, democracy was murdered and lawlessness made "legal." Raw power ruled, and its only real goal was to destroy all other powers besides itself.

Every nation has its war party. It is not the party of democracy. It is the party of autocracy. It seeks to dominate absolutely.

There is fascism, leading only into the blackness which it has chosen as its symbol, into smartness and yapping out of orders, and self-righteous brutality, into social as well as international war. It means change without hope. Our immediate duty - in that tinkering which is the only useful form of action in our leaky old tub - our immediate duty is to stop it.

What is more cruel than a tyrant's ear?

Every nation-state tends towards the imperial - that is the point. Through banks, armies, secret police, propaganda, courts and jails, treaties, taxes, laws and orders, myths of civil obedience, assumptions of civic virtue at the top.

The great crimes of the twentieth century were committed not by money-grubbing capitalists but by dedicated idealists. Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler were contemptuous of money. The passage from the nineteenth to the twentieth century has been a passage from considerations of money to considerations of power.