Authoritarian Regimes Quotes

To a certain extent, all dictatorships are alike. From Stalin's Soviet Union to Mao's China, from Ceauşescu's Romania to Saddam Hussein's Iraq, all these regimes had the same trappings ... But Kim Il-sung took the cult of personality to a new level. What distinguished him in the rogues' gallery of twentieth-century dictators was his ability to harness the power of faith. Kim Il-sung understood the power of religion.

The best blended Scotch in the history of the world - which was also the favourite drink of the Iraqi Baath Party, as it still is of the Palestinian Authority and the Libyan dictatorship and large branches of the Saudi Arabian royal family - is Johnnie Walker Black. Breakfast of champions, accept no substitute.

The Times and the Guardian accuse us of operating a police-state. The BBC Persian programme has made similar allegations, saying that countries such as Iran and Saudi Arabia should be denied access to Western military technology. What are the bloody fools on about? Do they seriously regard Iraq, or Algeria, or Libya as liberal regimes?.

Americans are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience.

nations that talk democracy make dirty little secret deals with strategic allies who have no use for democratic values

Without the public support, we cannot withstand two years and a half. Look at the other countries, look what happened in Libya, in Tunisia and in Egypt.

After visits to several Communist countries (USSR, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Slovenia, East Germany, Vietnam, China, Cuba), I feel strongly that most "revolutionary" types around the world don't realize the importance of freedom of the press and the air, a right to peaceably assemble and discuss anything, including the dangers of such discussions.

The Arab monarchies, especially Jordan and Morocco, are more legitimate than the false republics, with their stolen elections, regime-dominated courts and rubber-stamp parliaments.

There are many democracies in our Arab and Islamic countries, but unfortunately, they are all false democracies.

People can say what they want, but historically, feminism in the Dominican Republic has been extremely strong. I guess the best way of saying it is that no one could have survived what we survived - whether it was first extermination and slavery, then abandonment and erasure, then the series of gunboat two-bit dictatorships, followed by the final apotheosis of dictatorships, the Trujillato. You couldn't survive it without the resistance of this kind of woman.

There's a tradition in the history of dissent in authoritarian countries of a certain kind of dissident, and their form of dissent is to live their lives as normally as possible.

Let's look at two things real quickly: the civil rights movement in Mississippi in the Sixties and the Arab Spring starting in Tunisia and Cairo. What they had in common was people who were told, and who believed inside themselves, that they were a certain way, and the society at large believed it.

Only al-Jazeera is allowed to report from Zimbabwe, but it is unwatchable. Their Zimbabwean reporter Supa Mandiwanzira was one of Zanu-PF's praise-singers at the reviled Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation.

Vladimir Putin is creating an axis of authoritarian regimes that he will lead.

I've been to Uganda and to North Korea and to Eritrea, countless horror spots around the world.

Dictatorships can exist with free markets - not that China is really a free market - especially in poor countries where the regime insists that it's a choice between food and liberty, a false choice. But increasing affluence will inevitably result in political pressure.

In China, Vietnam, Russia and several former Soviet states, the dominant social networks are run by local companies whose relationship with the government actually constrains the empowering potential of social networks.

If you ask me the image of Latin America, there are sorne countries which oppress their peoples much more, and among the less - least oppressive, among those with which we could have perfectly normal relations without any difficulties - we could have Uruguay, Chile, maybe Costa Rica. But the U.S.. do not permit us.

We can speak of the triumph of capitalism in the world, but we cannot yet speak about the triumph of democracy. There is a serious mismatch between the political and the economic conditions that prevail in the world today.

Famines occur under a colonial administration, like the British Raj in India or for that matter in Ireland, or under military dictators in one country after another, like Somalia and Ethiopia, or in one-party states like the Soviet Union and China.

An extreme reflection of the dangers confronting modern social development is the growth of racism, nationalism, and militarism and, in particular, the rise of demagogic, hypocritical, and monstrously cruel dictatorial police regimes…. These tragic developments have always derived from the struggle of egotistical and group interests, the struggle for unlimited power, suppression of intellectual freedom, a spread of intellectually simplified, narrow-minded mass myths.

When an authoritarian regime starts taking down feeds and blocking websites just because we expose the truth... that's an attack on freedom of the press everywhere. When authoritarian regimes around the world start attacking journalists like that, we all have a problem.

The recently ended twentieth century was characterized by a level of human rights violations unparalleled in all of human history. In his book Death by Government, Rudolph Rummel estimates some 170 million government-caused deaths in the twentieth century. The historical evidence appears to indicate that, rather than protecting life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness of their citizens, governments must be considered the greatest threat to human security.

Bolshevism presented itself as an economic threat to themselves at the same time that Nazism presented itself as a political threat to their countries.

One of the strange things about violent and authoritarian regimes is they don't like the glare of negative publicity.