Peter Drucker Quotes

Tyranny and anarchy are alike incompatible with freedom, security, and the enjoyment of opportunity.

If social stability goes pear-shaped, you have a choice between anarchy and dictatorship. Most people will opt for more security, even if they have to give up some personal freedom.

Civilization begins with order, grows with liberty and dies with chaos.

I fear that, tired of anarchy, you may hope at the end for a return of oppression and that you may welcome the yoke of the first fortunate adventurer who shows up, who, far from consolidating your destiny, will only prolong your servitude

The worst thing in this world, next to anarchy, is government.

Starting from unlimited freedom, I conclude with unlimited despotism.

Institutions purely democratic must, sooner or later, destroy liberty, or civilization, or both.

it is impossible to preserve freedom anywhere when the zealots take over and the rule of law is ignored

You can choose whatever name you like for the two types of government. I personally call the type of government which can be removed without violence democracy, and the other tyranny.

You can't build politics on love. People aren't concerned with love; it's too disordered. They prefer despotism. Too much freedom breeds chaos.

When men have become heartily wearied of licentious anarchy, their eagerness has been proportionately great to embrace the opposite extreme of rigorous despotism.

Man and fascism cannot co-exist. If fascism conquers, man will cease to exist and there will remain only man-like creatures that have undergone an internal transformation. But if man, man who is endowed with reason and kindness, should conquer, then Fascism must perish, and those who have submitted to it will once again become people.

Arbitrary power is but the first natural step from anarchy, or the savage life.

You and I are told we must choose between a left or right, but I suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down. Up to man's age-old dream -- the maximum of individual freedom consistent with order --or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism. Regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would sacrifice freedom for security have embarked on this downward path.

Those who begin by burning books will end by burning people.

Tyranny is the political corollary of socialism, as representative government is the political corollary of the market economy.

Those who seek absolute power, even though they seek it to do what they regard as good, are simply demanding the right to enforce their own version of heaven on earth. And let me remind you, they are the very ones who always create the most hellish tyrannies. Absolute power does corrupt, and those who seek it must be suspect and must be opposed.

When man has nothing but his will to assert--even his good-will--it is always bullying. Bolshevism is one sort of bullying, capitalism another: and liberty is a change of chains.

It is perfectly clear that people, given no alternative, will choose tyranny over anarchy, because anarchy is the worst tyranny of all... The special nature of liberties is that they can be defended only as long as we still have them. So the very first signs of their erosion must be resisted, whether the issue be domestic surveillance by the Army, so-called preventive detention, or the freedom of corporate television, or that of a campus newspaper.

Churchill knew instinctively what was wrong with communism - that it repressed liberty; that it replaced individual discretion with state control; that it entailed the curtailment of democracy, and therefore that it was tyrannous.

Totalitarianism, if not fought against, could triumph anywhere.

Anarchy is the stepping stone to absolute power.

Wherever liberty as we understand it has been destroyed, this has almost always been done in the name of some new freedom promised to the people