"The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppose."
Read quote
21 likes
Tyrants quotes
Tyrants
600 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Explore further
Topics related to Tyrants
Browse quotes that often appear alongside tyrants — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
Quote collection
Tyrants quotes (page 4 of 30)
Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.
"Theocracy is the worst of all governments. If we must have a tyrant, a robber baron is far better than an inquisitor. The baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity at some point be sated; and since he dimly knows he is doing wrong he may possibly repent. But the inquisitor who mistakes his own cruelty and lust of power and fear for the voice of Heaven will torment us infinitely because he torments us with the approval of his own conscience and his better impulses appear to him as temptations."
Read quote
20 likes
"It is also in the interests of a tyrant to make his subjects poo...the people are so occupied with their daily tasks that they have no time for plotting."
Read quote
20 likes
"Today the primary threat to the liberties of the American people comes not from communism, foreign tyrants or dictators. It comes from the tendency on our own shores to centralize power, to trust bureaucracies rather than people."
Read quote
20 likes
"Let us render the tyrant no aid; let us not hold the light by which he can trace the footprints of our flying brother."
Read quote
20 likes
"Kings will be tyrants from policy, when subjects are rebels from principle."
Read quote
19 likes
"the greater the bureaucratization of public life, the greater will be the attraction of violence. In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left with whom one can argue, to whom one can represent grievances, on whom the pressures of power can be exerted. Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless we have a tyranny without a tyrant."
Read quote
18 likes
"Thoughts are tyrants that return again and again to torment us."
Read quote
17 likes
"Neither a life of anarchy nor a life under a despot should you praise. To all that lies in the middle has a god given excellence."
Read quote
17 likes
"Despots play their part in the works of thinkers. Fettered words are terrible words. The writer doubles and trebles the power of his writing when a ruler imposes silence on the people. Something emerges from that enforced silence, a mysterious fullness which filters through and becomes steely in the thought."
Read quote
17 likes
"The best government is a benevolent tyranny tempered by an occasional assassination."
Read quote
17 likes
"...to make the world safe for democracy."
Read quote
16 likes
"The tyrant claims freedom to kill freedom, and yet keep it for himself."
Read quote
16 likes
"Those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
Read quote
15 likes
"This tyrant, whose sole name blisters our tongues,Was once thought honest."
Read quote
15 likes
"Ask yourself why totalitarian dictatorships find it necessary to pour money and effort into propaganda for their own helpless, chained, gagged slaves, who have no means of protest or defense. The answer is that even the humblest peasant or the lowest savage would rise in blind rebellion, were he to realize that he is being immolated, not to some incomprehensible noble purpose, but to plain, naked human evil."
Read quote
14 likes
"A nation that enslaves another forges its own chains."
Read quote
14 likes
"Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think."
Read quote
14 likes
"When you stop a dictator, there are always risks. But there are greater risks in not stopping a dictator."
Read quote
14 likes
"Time is a strange thing. It is a whimsical tyrant, which in every century has a different face for all that one says and does."
Read quote
14 likes