Mohamed ElBaradei Quotes

Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi grabbed full power for himself. Not even the pharaohs had so much authority, to say nothing of his predecessor Hosni Mubarak. This is a catastrophe - it a mockery of the revolution that brought him to power and an act that leads one to fear the worst.

Democracy is dead in the Maldives.

Fascism may be good at making the trains run on time, but you wouldn't like some of the destinations.

Vladimir Putin is a dictator. He's not a leader. Anybody who thinks otherwise doesn't know Russian history and they don't know Vladimir Putin. Hillary Clinton knows exactly who this guy is. John McCain said, I look in his eyes and I see KGB. And Hillary kind of has that same feeling.

Stalin is too brutal. His powers should be taken away from him.

The whole administrative, judicial, and legislative machinery obeys a single will, the caprice of General Porfirio Diaz, who during his long administration has shown that the principal motive that guides him is to maintain himself in power and at any cost.

The poisoning of the civil discourse always accompanies totalitarian movements.

Nigeria first entered...'the dismal tunnel' on January 15, 1966, when the military overthrew all the institutions of a democratically elected government... If there is light at the end of this tunnel, it is imperceptible to anyone not paid to see it.

Maintaining legitimacy in an authoritarian state is very difficult.

All the calamities we have experienced, and those which are yet to come, are the result of the consolidating tendency of this government; and unless this tendency be arrested, all that has been foretold will certainly befall us,—even to the pouring out of the last vial of wrath, military despotism.

Morsi has appointed himself as Egypt’s new Pharaoh.

The eradication of the Muslim Brotherhood is nothing less than an abolition of democracy and a guarantee that Arabs will continue living under authoritarian and corrupt regimes.

Spain's constitution was introduced to cement democracy after Franco's dictatorship, but this government is exploiting its wording as a means to deny us our right to vote.

The exercise of politics is criminalized in Venezuela.

The aspiring tyrants of today have not forgotten the lesson of 1933: that acts of terror - real or fake, provoked or accidental - can provide the occasion to deal a death blow to democracy.

Musharraf has just gone against the constitution and displayed contempt of court and has shown that he has no respect for the rule of law.

Authoritarianism doesn't fall on a nation like a book falling from a shelf and striking you in the head. It rolls in like a slow tide.

Every country in history that has gone down dark paths, where governments take on too much control and really intervene and take away those freedoms, often start with an attack on the freedom to disagree.

Maduro distanced himself from democracy. He deconstructed the entire judiciary and blocked parliamentary processes.

"Our government will soon become what it is already a long way toward becoming, an elective dictatorship.

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.

A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud.

If I were to select a jack-booted group of fascists who are perhaps as large a danger to American society as I could pick today, I would pick BATF [the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms].

A midnight knock on the door followed by execution is no way a leader should be treated.

The road to tyranny, we must never forget, begins with the destruction of the truth.