Asma Jahangir Quotes

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.

The army and the government needs a dictator.

The revolutionary government is the despotism of liberty

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.

Democracy passes into despotism.

It's time to bury the unreal, failed 'realism' of those who have long thought that dictators brought stability.

The democratic state can sometimes abuse its power as much as those who seek to destroy it abuse fundamental rights and democratic practices.

Excessive dealings with tyrants are not good for the security of free states.

Despotism can only exist in darkness, and there are too many lights now in the political firmament to permit it to remain anywhere, as it has heretofore done, almost everywhere.

Perhaps the fact that we have seen millions voting themselves into complete dependence on a tyrant has made our generation understand that to choose one's government is not necessarily to secure freedom.

It is true you cannot eat freedom and you cannot power machinery with democracy. But then neither can political prisoners turn on the light in the cells of a dictatorship.

Oppressive government is more terrible than tigers.

I will never abuse power if elected.... This country [Russia] can never again fall under the influence of a dictator.

There is no such thing as a liberal dictatorship, because a dictator just cannot afford to be liberal.

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.

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

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

In any nation in which people's rights have been subordinated to the rights of the few, in any totalitarian nation, the first institution to be dismantled is the jury. I was, I am, afraid.

With the tools of democracy, democracy was murdered and lawlessness made "legal." Raw power ruled, and its only real goal was to destroy all other powers besides itself.

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

I love the people of Venezuela. I want that country to have freedom. I want it to have human rights and to be banned by a dictator like Nicolas Maduro is, to me, a badge of honor.

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.

Without democracy freedom is a chimera

Dictatorships are one-way streets. Democracy boasts two-way traffic.

The first country conquered by any dictator is his own country.