Autocracy Quotes

Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

It is dangerous to speak the truth to tyrants.

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.

I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.

He who has the greatest power put into his hands will only become the more impatient of any restraint in the use of it.

Absolute power, as we have always known, corrupts absolutely; it corrupts because it does not do the trick for the individual. Reality always creeps in--the reality of our helplessness and our mortality; the reality that, despite our reach for the stars, a creaturely fate awaits us.

I began life as an absolute monarchist - on condition, of course, that I be that monarch.

In a hundred years to come my people will not be fit for liberty. They do not know what it is….Despotism is the proper government for them.

When the people are sheep, the government is always a wolf.

The best government is a benevolent tyranny tempered by an occasional assassination.

The arbitrary rule of a just and enlightened prince is always bad. His virtues are the most dangerous and the surest form of seduction: they lull a people imperceptibly into the habit of loving, respecting, and serving his successor, whoever that successor may be, no matter how wicked or stupid.

Tyranny is always better organized than freedom.

The doctrine of blind obedience and unqualified submission to any human power, whether civil or ecclesiastical, is the doctrine of despotism, and ought to have no place among Republicans and Christians.

Concentration of power in a political machine is bad..

None of the evils which totalitarianism ... claims to remedy is worse than totalitarianism itself.

Better a hundred years of tyranny than one day of anarchy.

A democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years.

We are a slack people but deeply destructive … I think that a constitutional regime would mean the end of Russia. We need a despot!

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

No Bishops, no King.

Those who disagree with the dictator's plan have no other means to carry on than to defeat the despot by force of arms.

No man ruleth safely but that he is willingly ruled.

The Congress decisively rejects terrorism, i.e., the system of individual political assassinations, as being a method of political struggle which is most inexpedient at the present time, diverting the best forces from the urgent and imperatively necessary work of organization and agitation, destroying contact between the revolutionaries and the masses of the revolutionary classes of the population, and spreading both among the revolutionaries themselves and the population in general utterly distorted ideas of the aims and methods of struggle against the autocracy.

The means of defense against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home. Among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a war, whenever a revolt was apprehended. Throughout all Europe, the armies kept up under the pretext of defending, have enslaved the people.

The benevolent despot who sees himself as a shepherd of the people still demands of others the submissiveness of sheep.