Richard Henry Dana Quotes

Conquerors never, never conquer a nation to bring freedom. They brought control.

Dictators free themselves, but they enslave the people.

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

The doctrine of blind obedience and unqualified submission to any human power, whether civil or ecclesiastical, is the doctrine of despotism, and ought to have no place among Republicans and Christians.

Under the rule of a repressive whole, liberty can be made into a powerful instrument of domination.

Secrecy is the freedom tyrants dream of.

Tyranny is always better organized than freedom.

Whatever crushes individuality is despotism, by whatever name it may be called and whether it professes to be enforcing the will of God or the injunctions of men.

When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know, the end result is tyranny and oppression no matter how holy the motives.

The world is full of little dictators trying to run your life.

Whatever the immediate gains and losses, the dangers to our safety arising from political suppression are always greater than the dangers to the safety resulting from political freedom. Suppression is always foolish. Freedom is always wise.

Moammar Gaddafi, who has called himself the 'Guide of the First of September Great Revolution of the Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya,' should go down in history with the Emperor Bokassa and Idi Amin as a grotesque reminder of why people have the right to change their government.

Despotism can only exist in darkness, and there are too many lights now in the political firmament to permit it to remain anywhere, as it has heretofore done, almost everywhere.

Where liberty dies, evil grows.

Freedom of speech is always under attack by Fascist mentality, which exists in all parts of the world, unfortunately.

Tyrants are seldom free; the cares and the instruments of their tyranny enslave them.

Concentrated power has always been the enemy of liberty.

It is true you cannot eat freedom and you cannot power machinery with democracy. But then neither can political prisoners turn on the light in the cells of a dictatorship.

Slavery to monarchs and ministers, which the world will be long freeing itself from, and whose deadly grasp stops the progress of the human mind, is not yet abolished.

It is from weakness that people reach for dictators and concentrated government power. Only the strong can be free. And only the productive can be strong.

I beheld absolutism in all its power; and I felt encouraged to enter into a struggle against Augustin I.

Yes, citizens, Iturbide was a traitor, a hypocrite and an impious man who destroyed the assembly in which the people had deposited their sovereignty in order to appropriate it all to himself

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

Democracy is necessarily despotism, as it establishes an executive power contrary to the general will; all being able to decide against one whose opinion may differ, the will of all is therefore not that of all: which is contradictory and opposite to liberty.

Societies that restrict the space for citizens to participate and express dissent will eventually spawn a twisted, angry, and lethal response.