Herbert Hoover Quotes

They have been talking about a dictatorship and they were right because there's a dictatorship and there's a government that has been fighting that dictatorship, the dictatorship of the media.

It has been claimed at times that our modern age of technology facilitates dictatorship.

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.

Audacity is the currency for authoritarians.

Any excuse will serve a tyrant.

Secrecy is the freedom tyrants dream of.

Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda.

Despotism is a long crime.

When you have a person in power who punishes people for speaking their mind, it's truly dangerous.

Numerous politicians have seized absolute power and muzzled the press. Never in history has the press seized absolute power and muzzled the politicians.

Who were the fools who spread the story that brute force cannot kill ideas? Nothing is easier. And once they are dead they are no more than corpses.

I fear that, tired of anarchy, you may hope at the end for a return of oppression and that you may welcome the yoke of the first fortunate adventurer who shows up, who, far from consolidating your destiny, will only prolong your servitude

History’s most important lesson is that it has not been possible to make coercion compatible with the truth.

... a step in the direction of tyranny.

A dictator ... must fool all the people all the time and there's only one way to do that, he must also fool himself.

It was only a generation ago that we learned that the burning of books may precede the burning of people.

No truly sophisticated proponent of repression would be stupid enough to shatter the facade of democratic institutions.

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.

Every movement that seeks to enslave a country, every dictatorship or potential dictatorship, needs some minority group as a scapegoat which it can blame for the nation's troubles and use as a justification of its own demands for dictatorial powers.

Speech has never defeated fascism.

Than Shwe ordered the confiscation of all cell phones and laptops and computers so no reportage could come out of Burma. It seemed clear that a demon, something diabolical, rather than something compassionate and human was in charge of Burma.

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

Even if the country is run by a Mussolini, free speech will find its way.

The Qaddafis, father and sons, speak the grammar of dictatorship: threats and bribery.

Mobutu does not think he is God.