Roger Waters Quotes

Our city finds itself in an uncomfortable place: on the frontline between freedom and auto_cracy.

History reminds us that dictators and despots arise during times of severe economic crisis.

When an upstart dictator in the United States (Franklin Delano Roosevelt) succeeds in making this a one-party form of government, when the ballot is useless, I shall have the courage to stand up and advocate the use of bullets.

The army and the government needs a dictator.

Spend most of the day reading fascisti pamphlets. They certainly have turned the whole country into an army. From cradle to grave one is cast in the mould of fascismo and there can be no escape…. It is certainly a socialist experiment in that it destroys individuality. It also destroys liberty.

Speech has never defeated fascism.

Given the right conditions any society can turn against democracy.

Americans are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience.

The world has to have zero tolerance for naked dictatorship.

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.

It can't happen here is always wrong: a dictatorship can happen anywhere.

... I see the country going fascist. We have been going that route a long, long time. A lot of things the country has done from its inception were fascist. But now, now I think we are in the face of a terrible fascist dictatorship.

There is fascism, leading only into the blackness which it has chosen as its symbol, into smartness and yapping out of orders, and self-righteous brutality, into social as well as international war. It means change without hope. Our immediate duty - in that tinkering which is the only useful form of action in our leaky old tub - our immediate duty is to stop it.

When you stop a dictator, there are always risks. But there are greater risks in not stopping a dictator.

But on the other hand government takes away a certain amount of liberty and in some countries it takes away all of liberty. And it will, everywhere, if people who fight government do not fight government any longer.

Who is against democracy? Is it the one who calls for peaceful resistance, or the one who bombs people, sheds their blood and leads them away from the leaders under feeble and dirty pretexts?

It didn't take long for the world to realize that the Shah was an enlightened liberal next to the bloody reactionary regime that followed, and which executed more people in three months than the Shah had done in 30 years.

The regime is afraid of the people because it knows that free and fair elections will bring about its end.

You can't, in the 21st century, continue to live in a system where people live under martial law for 30 years.

The world will not accept dictatorship or domination.

We decline the claim to power by parties which want to own their followers body and soul, and which want to put themselves over and above the whole nation.

Tyranny is increasingly unsustainable in this post-cold-war era. It is doomed to failure. But it must be prodded to exit the stage with a whimper - not the bang that extremists long for.

I am told the Cheney-Bush team dislikes their junta being compared to the Nazis. If they ceased behaving like Nazis, no comparison would come to mind.

The rise of National Socialism is the protest of a people against a State that denies the right to work.

Moammar Gaddafi, who has called himself the 'Guide of the First of September Great Revolution of the Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya,' should go down in history with the Emperor Bokassa and Idi Amin as a grotesque reminder of why people have the right to change their government.