Don McLean Quotes

If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.

A state is not a state if it belongs to one man.

Spend most of the day reading fascisti pamphlets. They certainly have turned the whole country into an army. From cradle to grave one is cast in the mould of fascismo and there can be no escape…. It is certainly a socialist experiment in that it destroys individuality. It also destroys liberty.

The revolutionary government is the despotism of liberty

In a democracy the people choose a leader in whom they trust. Then the chosen leader says, 'Now shut up and obey me.' People and party are then no longer free to interfere in his business.

The absolute ruler may be a Nero, but he is sometimes a Titus or Marc Aurelius; the people is often Nero, but never Marc Aurelius.

To strip a man of all loyalties but those to the state, makes him not only a worm but a monster, without a shred of humanity.

Every tyrant who has lived has believed in freedom for himself.

Totalitarianism is patriotism institutionalized.

I have no desire to go in for tyranny or to play the part of King Charles. I hate tyranny in any field of human activity.

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.

You can't become a dictator through checks and balances.

Freedom only for the members of the government, only for the members of the Party - though they are quite numerous - is no freedom at all.

I would not like a king who could obey.

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.

Napoleon is a dangerous man in a free country. He seems tome to have the makings of a tyrant, and I believe that were he to be king he would be fully capable of playing such a part, and his name would become an object of detestation to posterity...

The National Socialist Party will prevent in the future, by force if necessary, all meetings and lectures which are likely to exercise a depressing influence on the German state.

In an absolute government there can be no... equiponderant parties. The despot is the government.

Government by one man: He is called a lord if he inclines to a good and common end; a tyrant if he is inclined to pursue bad or merely personal ends.

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.

One must not forget, however, that Russia had to free herself from the most frightful mis-government ever inflicted upon a long-suffering people.

I visited Libya in September 1996 for the 27th anniversary of the 'revolution' - a military coup that a 27-year-old Gadhafi led to topple the monarchy and since which he has ruled. Some were optimistic that Gadhafi's 'revolution' could herald a new Libya, but it didn't take long for his brutality to stamp out any such hopes.

It is in the nature of tyranny to deride the will of the people as the voice of the mob, and to denounce the cry for freedom as the roar of anarchy.

A democratic despotism is like a theocracy: it assumes its own correctness.

How a man who holds the entire population of a country as his prisoners, and punishes the families of those who escape, can be admired by people who call themselves liberals is one of the many wonders of the human mind's ability to rationalize. Yet such is the case with Fidel Castro.