Alan Keyes Quotes

Despotism sits nowhere so secure as under the effigy and ensigns of freedom.

A dictatorship would be a heck of a lot easier, there's no question about it.

Every one of the world's dictatorships can and does claim to be acting in the name of the people.

Oppressive government is more terrible than tigers.

One Hundred and Seventy Three Despots would surely be as oppressive as one.

Some of the defendants say that dictatorship can be good if there is a good dictator. But I say that a man cannot stay good if he becomes a dictator. Authoritarianism is a system that destroys man's morality. If you take a saint and give him power, he will change into a Hitler or a devil.

At times it is necessary for a country to have, for a time, some form or other of dictatorial power..

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

If you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him in absolute power, within a year he would be worse than the Tsar himself.

An autocratic system of coercion, in my opinion, soon degenerates. For force always attracts men of low morality, and I believe it to be an invariable rule that tyrants of genius are succeeded by scoundrels. For this reason I have always been passionately opposed to systems such as we see in Italy and Russia to-day.

With the tools of democracy, democracy was murdered and lawlessness made "legal." Raw power ruled, and its only real goal was to destroy all other powers besides itself.

Despotism often presents itself as the repairer of all the ills suffered, the support of just rights, defender of the oppressed, and founder of order.

Despotism is unjust to everybody, including the despot, who was probably made for better things.

Despotism has so often been established in the name of liberty that experience should warn us to judge parties by their practices rather than their preachings.

The fact is that certain themes cannot be celebrated in words, and tyranny is one of them. No one ever wrote a good book in praise of the Inquisition.

Enlightened despots are mythical creatures; real despots seem more interested in stealing money or installing their sons after them.

Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.

A collective tyrant, spread over the length and breadth of the land, is no more acceptable than a single tyrant ensconced on his throne.

The more complete the despotism, the more smoothly all things move on the surface.

It's time to bury the unreal, failed 'realism' of those who have long thought that dictators brought stability.

Every tyrant who has lived has believed in freedom for himself.

To assume all the powers is not good for anybody. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. All those experiments have a bad ending.

This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector.

If you're running a dictatorship, you don't really have to worry about the welfare or the property rights of the ordinary citizen. Only the people who keep you in power, a very small group, matter.