Tony Benn Quotes

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

The revolutionary government is the despotism of liberty

The deadliest foe of democracy is not autocracy but liberty frenzied.

The Emperor Napoleon, ascending gradually from his post of national magistrate to seat himself upon a throne without limits, seems to have wished to punish, as for the abuse of republican reforms, by making us feel all the weight of absolute monarchy.

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.

You can't become a dictator through checks and balances.

Freedom's skeptics must understand that the democracy that hates you is less dangerous than the dictator who loves you.

The price of freedom is less than the cost of repression.

The Chinese people are not a new kind of human nature. Human nature in China is the same as it is elsewhere. When you start in a tyrannical regime to hand out freedom there is no place to draw that line and expect that line to hold. And so it’s only a matter of time before this regime comes down

In all tyrannical governments the supreme magistracy, or the right both of making and of enforcing the laws, is vested in one and the same man, or one and the same body of men; and whenever these two powers are united together, there can be no public liberty.

Only the history of free peoples is worth our attention; the history of men under a despotism is merely a collection of anecdotes.

We Africans continue to allow tyrannical regimes to impose themselves on us.

Where is the democracy that British gave us? Ayub Khan robbed us of it. And what did he give us in return ? He gave us his own version of democracy which does not even deserve the name of democracy.

Despotisms usually ground themselves upon the theories of extreme democracy.

There are many democracies in our Arab and Islamic countries, but unfortunately, they are all false democracies.

If ... America is to become an empire, there is very little chance that it can avoid becoming a virtual dictatorship as well.

I don't want to take power. I want to break the wall of this autocratic regime.

I will be very sad and worried if the imperialist government was calling me a great democratic man.

Optimism comes less easily today, not because democracy is less vigorous, but because democracy's enemies have refined their instruments of repression.

Napoleon - the people who were becoming Napoleon's generals realized that for him, it was not about spreading freedom and revolution; it was about creating a new empire with Napoleon the dictator or the emperor.

If dictatorship is the concentration of power, freedom consists in its diffusion.

I lived in countries that had no democracy... so I don't find myself in the same luxury as you do. You grew up in freedom, and you can spit on freedom because you don't know what it is not to have freedom.

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

There are three kinds of despots. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the body. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the soul. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the soul and body alike. The first is called the Prince. The second is called the Pope. The third is called the People.

The absolute ruler may be a Nero, but he is sometimes a Titus or Marc Aurelius; the people is often Nero, but never Marc Aurelius.