Jean-Baptiste Say Quotes

A lasting order cannot be established by bayonets.

If people say that here and there someone has been taken away and maltreated, I can only reply: You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs.

If we look at history, we will see that regimes which persecute [their people] do not remain standing.

[It is a basic principle of a tyrant] to unarm his people of weapons, money and all means whereby they resist his power.

In a society like this there is no negotiation, no discussion, except to tell you that power can crush you any time they want — not only you, your whole family and all people like you.

The climax of terror is reached when the police state begins to devour its own children, when yesterday's executioner becomes today's victim.

The totalitarian phenomenon is not to be understood without making an allowance for the thesis that some important part of every society consists of people who actively want tyranny: either to exercise it themselves or - much more mysteriously - to submit to it.

Military despotism represses generous sentiments, priestly tyranny stifles them.

Where a harsh law rules, people yearn for lawlessness.

Tyranny and anarchy are alike incompatible with freedom, security, and the enjoyment of opportunity.

Given the chance to throw off a brutal dictator like Saddam Hussein, people will rejoice.

How did an allegedly free people spawn a vast, rampant cuttlefish of dominion with its tentacles in every orifice of the body politic?

To be governed is, under pretext of public utility and in the name of the general interest, to be laid under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, exhausted, hoaxed and robbed; then, upon the slightest resistance, at the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, annoyed, hunted down, pulled about, beaten, disarmed, bound, imprisoned, shot, judged, condemned, banished, sacrificed, sold, betrayed, and, to crown all, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored.

Authority is quite degrading.

How is it possible to live in world where people can rule millions of others? It's incredible! It's like we've gone back to the 12th century. That's what happens when you decapitate intelligentsia and repeatedly traumatize and brutalize a country for decades on end: you do not get virtue. Victims do not make nice people.

Wherever liberty as we understand it has been destroyed, this has almost always been done in the name of some new freedom promised to the people

The tyrant claims freedom to kill freedom, and yet keep it for himself.

In any case, it's the cowardice of people like you who give dictators the chance to install themselves!

The worst crime committed by totalitarian mind-sets is that they force their citizens, including their victims, to become complicit in their crimes. Dancing with your jailer, participating in your own execution, that is an act of utmost brutality.

The will of the nation is one of those phrases most widely abused by schemers and tyrants of all ages.

There are always people willing to commit unspeakable human atrocity in exchange for a little power and privilege.

A people who extend civil liberties only to preferred groups start down the path either to dictatorship of the right or the left.

Revolutions have never lightened the burden of tyranny; they have only shifted it to another shoulder.

It seems that the inevitable fate of man is never attain complete freedom: princes everywhere tend to despotism and the people to servitude.

Within a system which denies the existence of basic human rights, fear tends to be the order of the day.