George Ayittey Quotes

In your dread of dictators you established a state of society in which every ward boss is a dictator, every private employer a dictator, every financier a dictator, all with the livelihood of the workers at his mercy, and no public responsibility.

The dictator, in all his pride, is held in the grip of his party machine. He can go forward; he cannot go back. He must blood his hounds and show them sport, or else, like Actaeon of old, be devoured by them. All-strong without, he is all-weak within.

Many Communist government officials have a rigid, dictatorial power, but they live in constant suspicion and fear of anything that might undermine the power they have.

Military dictatorship, you can focus on it, you can fight it directly. It's a band of power-driven people.

What you had at the time was a dictatorship with the team owners.

Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence.

The purpose of torture is not getting information. It's spreading fear.

There is no good terror and bad terror. Terror is terror. There's not terror that you can accept and terror that you cannot accept. Terror is terror. Murder is murder.

The purpose behind terrorism is to instill fear in people - the fear that electrical power, for instance, will be taken away or the transportation system will be taken down.

Fear is, I believe, a most effective tool in destroying the soul of an individual - and the soul of a people.

When it comes to tyrants, dictators and terrorists, strength and the threat of force is the only language they understand.

Aside from the occasional genocide, oppression, evil and torture, etc., it is inarguable that public policy could be implemented more rapidly in an autocracy.

The Soviets, where ten percent of the population controls the entire public by dictatorship. This will certainly not last long, in light of the historical dialectic

For an Arab to be suspected of a lukewarm adherence to the national cause is to invite a visit from a body of gunmen…. A number of Arabs have asked for British Government protection.

He who strikes terror into others is himself in continual fear.

Torture is a very humiliating experience. The goal is not to obtain information but to punish and break you so that you won't do anything against the authorities. You are made an example to others so that they will be too terrified to do anything either.

Evil societies always try to kill their consciences.

Churchill and Hitler are striving to change the nature of their respective countrymen by forcing and hammering violent methods on them. Man may be suppressed in this manner but he cannot be changed.

Bullets, beatings and bombings—not bullshit!

Terrorism is what the weak use to increase their bargaining power against the strong.

Fear is in almost all cases a wretched instrument of government, and ought in particular never to be employed against any order of men who have the smallest pretensions to independency.

Terror consists mostly of useless cruelties perpetrated by frightened people in order to reassure themselves.

I have seen how leaders rule by intimidation. Leaders who demonize and dehumanize entire groups of people often do so because they have nothing else to offer. And I have seen how places that stifle the voices and dismiss the potential of their citizens are diminished: how they are less vital, less hopeful, less free.

The political lives of tyrants play out human affairs with a special intensity: the death of a democratic leader long after his retirement is a private matter, but the death of a tyrant is always a political act that reflects the character of his power.

What's the definition of terrorism? It's to achieve an objective through the use of force and fear. These are just nasty, evil, disgusting human beings who disrespect human life.