Tyrants quotes
600 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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"Only a humorless tyrant could want a perpetual chanting of praises that, one has no choice but to assume, would be the innate virtues and splendors furnished him by his creator, infinite regression, drowned in praise!"
"A prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a people who mean to be free."
"Law is often the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the right of an individual."
"Whether the authorities be invaders or merely local tyrants, the effect of such [gun control] laws is to place the individual at the mercy of the state, unable to resist."
"The tyrant is a child of pride."
"All the cops are just workers for the one percent, and they don't even realize they're being exploited."
"I can remember when Democrats believed that it was the duty of America to fight for freedom over tyranny."
"My method is conversion, not coercion, it is self-suffering, not the suffering of the tyrant. I know that method to be infallible."
"... one of the things the tyrant most cunningly engineers is the gross over-simplification of language, because propaganda requires that the minds of the collective respond primitively to slogans of incitement."
"Tyrants are seldom free; the cares and the instruments of their tyranny enslave them."
"Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion."
"If you are too weak to give yourselves your own law, then a tyrant shall lay his yoke upon you and say: "Obey! Clench your teeth and obey!" And all good and evil shall be drowned in obedience to him."
"If we must have a tyrant, let him at least be a gentleman who has been bred to the business, and let us fall by the axe and not by the butcher's cleaver."
"I never revolted in vain, as a rebel or as a tyrant, but I rose seeking reformation for the nation of my grandfather Mohammad. I intend to enjoin good and forbid evil, to act according to the traditions of my grandfather, and my father Ali Ibn Abi-Talib."
"Power is a dangerous thing. Be careful that you don't abuse it or let it make a tyrant of you."
"How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been: how gloriously different are the saints."
"When sometimes, behind his back, they called him a tyrant, he merely smiled and uttered this profound observation: If some day I turn liberal, they will say I have let them down."
"It is remarkable how many misconceptions there are here about life in the developing world and I think that that knowledge gap has done a lot to contribute to the imbalance quite frankly."
"The tyranny of a multitude is a multiplied tyranny."
"Any ideal system is its own worst enemy, and as soon as you start to implement these visions of grandeur, they just fall apart and turn into a complete tyranny."
