Gregory David Roberts Quotes

Will people ever be wise enough to refuse to follow bad leaders or to take away the freedom of other people?

The melancholy thing about the world is that it is full of stupid people; and the world is run for the benefit of the stupid and common.

Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts... perhaps the fear of a loss of power.

Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought. To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears. To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool. To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen. To be led by a liar is to ask to be lied to. To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery.

Power, lodged as it must be in human hands, will be ever liable to abuse.

A totalitarian society makes enormous demands on the courage of men, and a partially totalitarian society makes even greater demands because the general anxiety is greater.

Don’t you shit me George. You and I know who has the power in Alabama.

Two forms of government are favorable to the prevalence of falsehood and deceit. Under a Despotism, men are false, treacherous, and deceitful through fear, like slaves dreading the lash. Under a Democracy they are so as a means of attaining popularity and office, and because of the greed for wealth.

Politics runs on power and money and on ignorance.

The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.

The probability of the people in power being individuals who would dislike the possession and exercise of power is on a level with the probability that an extremely tender-hearted person would get the job of whipping-master in a slave plantation.

Absolute power can only be supported by error, ignorance and prejudice.

There is no tyranny so hateful as a vulgar and anonymous tyranny. It is all-permeating, all-thwarting; it blasts every budding novelty and sprig of genius with its omnipresent and fierce stupidity. Such a headless people has the mind of a worm and the claws of a dragon.

Men are so stupid and concerned with their present needs, they will always let themselves be deceived.

There is a cowardly propensity in the human heart that delights in oppressing somebody else, and in the gratification of this base desire we always select a victim that can be outraged with safety.

I have plumbed the depth of human cowardice and I realized that there is only one way to be right, and that is to be in power.

Ignorance and fear are twins whose mother is slavery and whose father is oppression, and the mentality of the whole family is that of slaves.

Every decent man of our age must be a coward and a slave. That is his normal condition. Of that I am firmly persuaded. He is made and constructed to that very end. And not only at the present time owing to some casual circumstance, but always, at all times, a decent man is bound to be a coward and a slave.

I hate cowardice; I will have nothing to do with cowards or political nonsense.

The wickedness of men is that their power breeds stupidity and blindness.

Tolerance of intolerance is cowardice.

Fear and realisation of ignorance, strong medicines against stupid pride.

Perhaps a normal man is supposed to be stupid-how do we know? Perhaps it's even very beautiful.

The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity but the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities, that makes it seem inconceivable that other ways are viable, that removes the sense that there is an outside.

Those kids aren't dumb. But the people who run these schools want to make sure they don't get smart: they are really teaching the kids to be slaves.