Katherine Anne Porter Quotes

Better a hundred years of tyranny than one day of anarchy.

If social stability goes pear-shaped, you have a choice between anarchy and dictatorship. Most people will opt for more security, even if they have to give up some personal freedom.

You can't build politics on love. People aren't concerned with love; it's too disordered. They prefer despotism. Too much freedom breeds chaos.

Workers ... do not eat legal rights but bread. History, especially recent history, gives much evidence to support the contention that men want security more than freedom and that for an indefinite time they may be successfully governed by a dictator who keeps in mind the maxim that 'contented cows give the best milk.'

A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves.

Better 100 years of tyranny than one day of anarchy.

No amendment of the proper kind would ever be obtained by the people, if the government should become oppressive, which I verily believe will be the case.

Order without liberty and liberty without order are equally destructive.

This excessive licence, which the anarchists think is the only true freedom, provides the stock, as it were, from which a tyrant grows.

Tyranny and anarchy are alike incompatible with freedom, security, and the enjoyment of opportunity.

When men have become heartily wearied of licentious anarchy, their eagerness has been proportionately great to embrace the opposite extreme of rigorous despotism.

Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places and we need only some bombs and a few prisons to blot it out altogether.

When liberty becomes license, dictatorship is near.

Setting people to spy on one another is not the way to protect freedom.

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

It's about living in a world with rules, or a world without rules.

The more laws that governments pass, the less individual freedom there is. Any student of history will tell you that. Totalitarian countries ban pretty much everything.

Civilization begins with order, grows with liberty and dies with chaos.

Where liberty dies, evil grows.

Democracy is an imperfect way of steering between the violence of anarchy and the violence of tyranny, with the least violence you can get away with.

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

Politics is a pendulum whose swings between anarchy and tyranny are fueled by perennially rejuvenated illusions.

Dictatorship: A system of government where everything that isn't forbidden is obligatory.

The worst thing in this world, next to anarchy, is government.