authoritarian tendencies Quotes

If you have ever seen a four-year-old trying to lord it over a two-year-old, then you know what the basic problem of human nature is - and why government keeps growing larger and ever more intrusive.

All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible. Such people have a tendency to become drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted.

All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities.

All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible.

A lot of what is called 'public service' consists of making hoops for other people to jump through. It is a great career for those who cannot feel fulfilled unless they are telling other people what to do.

Trump hasn't really done anything yet to abuse his powers. I don't even know if he knows what all his powers are as president. And that worries me. He will learn. After he learns how the presidency works, he could become much more dangerous, because his personality doesn't change. Once presidents find their powers, they don't give them up. They use them.

When Donald Trump - star of 'Celebrity Apprentice', the man who brought you Trump Vodka, Trump Steaks, and Trump "University" very likely fraud and fail; and Twitter-hands extraordinaire - is setting up his bobblehead on the desk of the Oval Office and shredding through nuclear codes, you only have yourself to blame.

The Turkish Army will not allow itself to be bound hand and foot by democracy and human rights.

Donald Trump amplifies the worst instincts. And his nationalism is really a white racist supremacist nationalism.

There is a little bit of the totalitarian buried somewhere, way down deep, in each and everyone of us.

I feel much alarmed at the prospect of seeing General Jackson President. He is one of the most unfit men I know of for such a place. He has had very little respect for laws and constitutions, and is, in fact, an able military chief. His passions are terrible.

Russia's inclination toward authoritarianism undoubtedly strengthened the leaders in Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Kazakhstan, as they are afraid of normal democratic procedures.

Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government’s purposes are beneficent…the greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding.

The strengthening of our statehood is, at times, deliberately interpreted as authoritarianism.

Donald Trump is way worse than George W. Bush. George W. Bush is a fundamentally decent man of limited intelligence who surrounded himself with awful people who dragged him in terrible directions. He was a bad president. But he was not actively malign, in the sense that he did what he thought was right. I don't think this guy cares what's right. I think he's in it for self-aggrandizement, for profit, and for power.

Man is more disposed to domination than freedom; and a structure of dominion not only gladdens the eye of the master who rears and protects it, but even its servants are uplifted by the thought that they are members of a whole, which rises high above the life and strength of single generations.

The near-total control of the most prestigious universities and colleges by intolerant extremists of the left is breeding not only generations of entitled little authoritarians but legions of apologists for violence against their own perceived enemies.

Those who were closest to Yeltsin behaved as if they were running the government.

The representatives of people become uncrowned kings and queens once they get into Parliament.

If you read people like say Bruce Blair one of the leading, most sober, knowledgeable specialists, he says, look, [Donald Trump] statements are all over the map, but his personality is frightening, he's a complete megalomaniac.

I do know I'm a control freak.

The worst way to defend our freedom is to let our leaders start taking away our freedoms! It is exactly during times like these [a national crisis] that we need more freedom of speech, a strong and critical press, and a citizenry that is not afraid to stand up and say that the emperor has no clothes.

The populist left loves power more than democracy, and it will fight to keep it at great cost.

Donald Trump really has authoritarian, dictatorial instincts.

I don't think Trump is a deeply self-aware person. But he's absolutely off the charts as a narcissist. He is the consummate narcissistic salesman. He is in fact a sick man. And that's potentially very dangerous. The only positive thing about Trump is that he has no ideology, he is an empty vessel, surrounded by people who give him ideas, and it only matters which ideas will shine the light on Trump.