Giorgio Agamben Quotes

We've been saying Putin is a dictator for years who doesn't care about the law.

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

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

I am the government.

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

I grew up in a dictatorship in East Africa.

... the perfect dictatorship.

Dictator, n. An evil man who maintains power by intimidation and force, refusing to obey the United States.

Dictators are the last to know.

I am inclined to believe dictators. Not to is dangerous.

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.

Romania, which had the worst dictator in Eastern Europe, Ceausescu, he was a darling of the West. The United States and Britain loved him. He was supported until the last minute.

Dictatorship is like a giant beech-tree - very magnificent to look at in its prime, but nothing grows underneath it.

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.

Once you get a tyranny, you don't easily get rid of it. Much better to remember about eternal vigilance.

This is not a democracy," I said, understanding he fear but unable to do anything about it. "It's a Maxocracy.

Dictatorship is a constant lecture instructing you that your feelings, your thoughts and desires are of no account, that you are a nobody and must live as you are told by other people who desire and think for you

Fear must rule in a despotism.

Fear has always been the driving force behind all dictators' repression.

If you've lived in a dictatorship for thirty years, you're used to people lying to you.

Every dictatorship has ultimately strangled in the web of repression it wove for its people, making mistakes that could not be corrected because criticism was prohibited.

Nothing is so loved by tyrants as obedient subjects.

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

To build a country, [Joseph] Stalin was obliged to use force and kill. Mao Tse-tung was obliged to use force and kill. To mention only two recent cases, without raking over the whole history of the world.