David Letterman Quotes

Everything Mengistu has done since 1977 has been to place himself in a position of uncontestable power. Neither Haile Selassie nor any of the previous emperors had this insatiable thirst for power.

A police state is a country run by criminals

He [Rafael Trujillo] had his torture chambers. He had his political assassinations. But he kept law and order, cleaned the place up, made it sanitary, built public works, and he didn’t bother the United States. So that was fine with us.

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.

Saddam Hussein, influenced by fascism, ordered the deaths of tens of thousands of people, fought two disastrous wars, turned his nation into an international pariah and ruined his country’s economy. In other words, his record is identical to George W. Bush’s.

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.

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.

To understand why dictators have a problem with making peace - or at least a genuine peace - the link between the nature of a regime and its external behavior must be understood.

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

In writing a little tragedy, 'The Gaol Gate,' I made the scenario in three lines, 'He is an informer; he is dead; he is hanged.' I wrote that play very quickly.

There's nothing so improves the mood of the Party as the imminent execution of a senior colleague.

Madame... I have come from a country where one can be hanged for what one says.

Around him are the riffraff of thick-skinned party leaders. He plays off the half-humans with favours. Forging edict after edict as if they were horseshoes- Shoots some in the forehead, others in the chest, the eye, the groin. Everyday he has an execution -- for our Broadchested Georgian it's like picking raspberries

Oppressive government is more terrible than tigers.

Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms [of government] those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations perverted it into tyranny.

He who makes another powerful ruins himself.

Wherever the real power in a Government lies, there is the danger of oppression.

If I were a citizen of Russia, I would resist this communist dictatorship as vigorously as I have endeavored to resist the encroachment upon our democratic institutions in America. I hold that government of one class, denying the other classes the right to participate is tyranny.

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.

Every punishment is based, not on logic or the feeling of justice, but on the desire to wish evil on those who have done evil to you or to another person…. Everything about our present system of punishments and about all criminal law will be thought of by future generations in the same way that we think of cannibalism or human sacrifice to the pagan gods. “How did they not see the uselessness and cruelty of those things which they did?” our descendants will say about us.

Former Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi and the radical Islamist mullahs ruling Iran share many similarities, but honesty and negotiating in good faith are not among them.

There's a lot of hypocrisy and condescension in Israel's institutionalized support for Mubarak's tyrannical rule, in its backing of a corrupt leader who established a brutal secret police state to suppress his citizens and keep their mouths shut.

In the Franco era, we couldn't defend our ideas.

Even the worst dictator, there is not a single one of them who would say "Oh yes, I violate human rights." They all claim "oh no, we respect human rights" even when they are doing the most egregious things.