Naomi Wolf Quotes

Oppressive government is more terrible than tigers.

In domestic as in political tyranny, the case of absolute monsters chiefly illustrates the institution by showing that there is scarcely any horror which may not occur under it if the despot pleases

Europeans have sometimes been beguiled by a despotism that comes concealed in the seductive form of an ideal – as it did in the cases of Hitler and Stalin. This fact may remind us that the possibility of despotism is remote neither in space nor in time.

It can't happen here is always wrong: a dictatorship can happen anywhere.

We have a war dictator who was not elected, he snuck in. so he punishes people that threaten him in any way, or even say something he doesn't like. It has no resemblance to democracy.

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

Africa has more dictators per capita than any other continent.

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.

Brutal men with unlimited power are the same all over the world.

Stalin is too brutal. His powers should be taken away from him.

The whole administrative, judicial, and legislative machinery obeys a single will, the caprice of General Porfirio Diaz, who during his long administration has shown that the principal motive that guides him is to maintain himself in power and at any cost.

To trample democracy with one’s feet and to give power to a single man over almost eighty million people is so terrible that one can very probably tremble over the events which will come here.

Some of the defendants say that dictatorship can be good if there is a good dictator. But I say that a man cannot stay good if he becomes a dictator. Authoritarianism is a system that destroys man's morality. If you take a saint and give him power, he will change into a Hitler or a devil.

Erdogon has become so paranoid, so power-hungry, he doesn't even allow institutions to flourish. It has become a one-man show.

Colonel Qaddafi's tyranny was absolutist, monarchical, and personal. The problem with such dictatorships is that as long as the tyrant lives, he reigns and terrorizes.

Despotism sits nowhere so secure as under the effigy and ensigns of freedom.

The practice of arbitrary imprisonments have been, in all ages, the favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny.

Under dictatorship, the people in prison are always superior to the people who put them there.

No society has gone the way of gulags or concentration camps by following the path of Spinoza and Einstein and Jefferson and Thomas Paine

Despotism has so often been established in the name of liberty that experience should warn us to judge parties by their practices rather than their preachings.

None of the evils which totalitarianism ... claims to remedy is worse than totalitarianism itself.

It didn't take long for the world to realize that the Shah was an enlightened liberal next to the bloody reactionary regime that followed, and which executed more people in three months than the Shah had done in 30 years.

Despotism increases in severity with the number of despots; the responsibility is more divided, and the claims are more numerous.

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

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