A. N. Wilson Quotes

Dictators free themselves, but they enslave the people.

I would be opposed to any kind of totalitarian control.

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

Cromwell is just as much of a bloody dictator as was Stalin.

They (who) seek to establish systems of government based on the regimentation of all human beings by a handful of individual rulers … call this a new order. It is not new and it is not order.

… the greatest tyrant in the world; the greatest terrorist in the world.

When a dictatorship controls the political life of a country, responsible opposition cannot develop, and dissent is driven underground and toward the extreme. And to draw attention away from their social and economic failures, dictators place blame on other countries and other races, and stir the hatred that leads to violence. This status quo of despotism and anger cannot be ignored or appeased, kept in a box or bought off.

You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police. Yet in their hearts there is unspoken – unspeakable fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts!

Oppressive government is more terrible than tigers.

Dictators always look good until the last ten minutes.

This is the only country in the world where a dictator will be allowed to sit among a democratically elected Congress. Everywhere else evil dictators go into exile.

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

Witness the tragic condition of Russia. The methods of State centralization have paralyzed individual initiative and effort; the tyranny of the dictatorship has cowed the people into slavish submission and all but extinguished the fires of liberty; organized terrorism has depraved and brutalized the masses and stifled every idealistic aspiration; institutionalized murder has cheapened human life, and all sense of the dignity of man and the value of life has been eliminated; coercion at every step has made effort bitter, labor a punishment, has turned the whole of existence into a scheme of mutual deceit, and has revived the lowest and most brutal instincts of man.

A dictatorship breeds distrust.

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.

Kim Jong-un's style is more suggestive of Saddam Hussein or his murderous son, Uday Hussein.

The more complete the despotism, the more smoothly all things move on the surface.

This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector.

Despotism is a long crime.

It is hard to look the other way when a dictator is being so cruel and violent with his own people.

I'd never been in a police state. I didn't know what it was. I knew that it was, in the general way that people know that two and two is four, but it had no emotional value for me until I found myself in the middle of it.

I grew up in the shadow of the Trujillato, saw how the regime had ravaged so many families.

Dictators are interesting, no?

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

I admit that what you have just heard might be for the welfare of the country, were it not that the presence of despotism are always dangerous.