Mather Byles Quotes

The ultimate failures of dictatorship cost humanity far more than the temporary failures of democracy.

The revolutionary government is the despotism of liberty

Despotism subjects a nation to one tyrant; democracy, to many.

Tyranny is always better organized than freedom.

Whatever crushes individuality is despotism, by whatever name it may be called and whether it professes to be enforcing the will of God or the injunctions of men.

Dictatorship naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme liberty.

Despotism can only exist in darkness, and there are too many lights now in the political firmament to permit it to remain anywhere, as it has heretofore done, almost everywhere.

Concentrated power has always been the enemy of liberty.

It is from weakness that people reach for dictators and concentrated government power. Only the strong can be free. And only the productive can be strong.

Only the history of free peoples is worth our attention; the history of men under a despotism is merely a collection of anecdotes.

The more a regime claims to be the embodiment of liberty the more tyrannical it is likely to be.

... timid men who prefer the calm of despotism to the boisterous sea of liberty.

Whatever crushes individuality is despotism.

all government without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery

Despotisms usually ground themselves upon the theories of extreme democracy.

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.

… the meanest and worst of all forms of government

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

Despotism accomplishes great things illegally; liberty doesn't even go to the trouble of accomplishing small things legally.

Democracy is the opposite of totalitarianism, communism, fascism, or mobocracy.

Without democracy freedom is a chimera

Despotism can do without faith but freedom cannot.

Those who abhors democracy would rarely immigrate to an authoritarian state if they have to.

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

In most of history, societies have not been free. It's a very rare society that is free. The default condition of human societies is tyranny.