Authoritarian Collapse Quotes

The tsar [Nicholas II] is not treacherous but he is weak. Weakness is not treachery, but it fulfils all its functions.

If we haven't become the Liberty Party of an undoubted future, let us take this fact: the great totalitarian regimes have died. The Soviet Union broke up along ethnic lines, as we always thought it would. The Chinese - am I wrong? - are becoming a commercial civilization.

A new Russian Revolution is inevitable, and that it may come much sooner than anyone would now dare to hope… I do not believe it possible that the thirst for freedom and decency in the countries of the Soviet Empire can remain much longer unslaked, and that any attempt either to quench it by total repression or to satisfy it by real reforms, will be cataclysmically destructive of the eroded foundations of the entire State system.

We got rid of Muammar Gaddafi. I never thought I would be able to write these words.

To understand why dictators fall, it helps to recognise factors that produce a perfect anti-dictatorial storm. Barring missteps such as those that led to Gaddafi's undoing, a dictator's survival can be at risk because of newness in office, poor health, or old age combined with economic trouble.

Mugabe's resignation fascinates because the fall of tyrants is always a family story, decline of the father, writ large. What a strange creature he is.

Sexually awakened women, affirmed and recognized as such, would mean the complete collapse of the authoritarian ideology