authoritarian behavior Quotes

O slavish man! will you not bear with your own brother, who has God for his Father, as being a son from the same stock, and of the same high descent? But if you chance to be placed in some superior station, will you presently set yourself up for a tyrant?

Now that I believe in God, I have an extra layer of saying I'll write about what I write about and assume that I'm being offered the opportunity to illuminate something important. But when you think you are too important, you become some sort of fascist.

I've had my fill of Hitler. These conferences called by the ringing of a bell are not to my liking. The bell is rung when people call their servants. And besides, what kind of conferences are these? For five hours I am forced to listen to a monologue which is quite fruitless and boring

Trump's lying, his self-regard, his self-soothing, his lack of empathy, his narcissistic rage, his contempt for norms, rules, laws, facts and simple truths - have all come home to roost.

Taliban-esque: Any behavior that imposes the beliefs of one person on everyone else. Conversations with the Taliban-esque are impossible. They aren't even conversations. With them, it's my way or no way.

The high-handed bureaucratic excesses of the IRS are a national disgrace ... riding roughshod over the taxpayers and making a joke out of our rule of laws.

The less power a man has, the more he likes to use it.

Power is the test. Some, once they have it, are content to buy the show of liking, and punish those who withhold it; then you have a despot. But some keep a true eye for how they seem to others, and care about it, which holds them back from much mischief.

I was quite the spoiled brat. I have quite a temper, obviously inherited from my father, and I became very good at ordering everyone around. I was the princess; the staff were absolutely terrified of me.

There are a lot of people who want to give orders and be bossy that don't deserve respect.

The weaker the man in authority... the stronger his insistence that all his privileges be acknowledged.

I'm telling you anybody is better than Narendra Modi because he won't listen to anybody.

There was a free election in Palestine, but it came out the wrong way. So instantly, the United States and Israel with Europe tagging along, moved to punish the Palestinian people, and punish them harshly, because they voted the wrong way in a free election. That's accepted here in the West as perfectly normal. That illustrates the deep hatred and contempt for democracy among western elites, so deep-seated they can't even perceive it when it's in front of their eyes. You punish people severely if they vote the wrong way in a free election.

When you seek to dominate another you dominate no one but disempower yourself.

The Jacobins, finding themselves unable to manage their business on the questions in the House, have adopted a plan of meeting in divan and agreeing on measures to be pursued and passed in the House and then they vote in mass without admitting any alteration in the plan proposed. The wickedness of such a course has never been equalled.... [T]he spirit is intolerant and must lead to ruin.

I don't have an assistant. I make a lot of people around me my slaves, but no assistant.

A team effort is a lot of people doing what I say.

The left is entering a new phase of ideological agitation no longer trying to win the debate but stopping debate altogether, banishing from public discourse any and all opposition. The proper word for that attitude is totalitarian. It declares certain controversies over and visits serious consequences from social ostracism to vocational defenestration upon those who refuse to be silenced.

If you have got high-ranking officials reaching down five levels in the bureaucracy to drag an analyst up to their office to berate them and threaten their jobs because they don't like the conclusions about an intelligence matter, that, in my view, is dangerous.

When you're convinced that you're right and you believe that you have the license to do anything because you're right, you can be bossy and you can be dangerous. You can be oppressive. You can be a tyrant.

Examples of vicious courses practiced in a domestic circle corrupt more readily and more deeply when we behold them in persons in authority.

Teachers try to make us feel lower than themselves, maybe because this is because they feel lower than outside people. One teacher told me to get out of the room and never come back, which I did.

If Donald Trump is just tweeting about a union guy, then he's just being the bully we have seen. But if he uses the power of the presidency to back up some of those tweets and he's really, really coming down with a hammer on people he doesn't like using the power of the presidency, then we're seeing something very new and very different.