#Dictatorship Quotes

“No socialist government conducting the entire life and industry of the country could afford to allow free, sharp or violently worded expressions of public discontent. They would have to fall back on some form of Gestapo, no doubt very humanly directed in the first instance.”

“The dictator, in all his pride, is held in the grip of his party machine. He can go forward; he cannot go back. He must blood his hounds and show them sport, or else, like Actaeon of old, be devoured by them. All-strong without, he is all-weak within.”

“I am not invested with dictatorial powers. If I were, I should be quite ready to dictate.”

“Dictators ride to and fro upon tigers which they dare not dismount. And the tigers are getting hungry.”

“When dictatorship is a fact, revolution becomes a right.”

“How a man who holds the entire population of a country as his prisoners, and punishes the families of those who escape, can be admired by people who call themselves liberals is one of the many wonders of the human mind's ability to rationalize. Yet such is the case with Fidel Castro.”

“So many idealistic political movements for a better world have ended in mass-murdering dictatorships. Giving leaders enough power to create 'social justice' is giving them enough power to destroy all justice, all freedom, and all human dignity.”

“The reason that democracies always defeat dictatorships is because they're open to debate. We should never allow Washington to say, 'Shut up, get in line and wave the flag.'”

“There ought to be an absolute dictatorship... a dictatorship of painters... a dictatorship of one painter... to suppress all those who have betrayed us.”

“Is it not the excess and greed of this and the neglect of all other things that revolutionizes this constitution too and prepares the way for the necessity of a dictatorship?”

“The reaction that a ruthless dictator sets up in us either that of awe or pity according respectively as we react to him violently on nonviolently.”

“In my view dictators do not surrender. They have to be well and truly defeated.”

“Dictators can be deterred, they can be crushed - but they can never be appeased.”

“When you stop a dictator, there are always risks. But there are greater risks in not stopping a dictator.”

“Napoleon was the best method. Dissolved all representative institutions and it decided who should rule the state with him.”

“All the experience the Chinese people have accumulated through several decades teaches us to enforce the people's democratic dictatorship, that is, to deprive the reactionaries of the right to speak and let the people alone have that right.”

“Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right.”

“The People's democratic dictatorship is based on the alliance of the working class, the peasantry and the urban petty bourgeoisie, and mainly on the alliance of the workers and the peasants, because these two classes comprise 80 to go per cent of China's population. These two classes are the main force in overthrowing imperialism and the Kuomintang reactionaries. The transition from New Democracy to socialism also depends mainly upon their alliance.”

“Every provisional political set-up following a revolution requires a dictatorship, and an energetic dictatorship at that.”

“There is no such thing as a naval dictatorship.”

“Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.”

“In your dread of dictators you established a state of society in which every ward boss is a dictator, every private employer a dictator, every financier a dictator, all with the livelihood of the workers at his mercy, and no public responsibility.”

“The fallacy is to believe that under a dictatorial government you can be free inside”

“Napoleon is always right.”

“I tell the American people solemnly that the United States will never survive as a happy and fertile oasis of liberty surrounded by a cruel desert of dictatorship.”

“I fearthat both dictators [Hitler and Mussolini] think their present methods are succeeding because of the gains they have made in Albania, Hungary and Yugoslavia.”

“Those newspapers of the nation which most loudly cried dictatorship against me would have been the first to justify the beginnings of dictatorship by somebody else.”

“History proves that dictatorships do not grow out of strong and successful governments, but out of weak and helpless ones. If by democratic methods people get a government strong enough to protect them from fear and starvation, their democracy succeeds; but if they do not, they grow impatient. Therefore, the only sure bulwark of continuing liberty is a government strong enough to protect the interests of the people, and a people strong enough and well enough informed to maintain its sovereign control over its government.”

“I don't think anyone would disagree with the conclusion that Saddam [Hussein] was a terrible dictator. He had gassed his own people and his neighbors. He had killed thousands of people, and he had started a couple of wars and destroyed his country.”

“Whenever justice is uncertain and police spying and terror are at work, human beings fall into isolation, which, of course, is the aim and purpose of the dictator state, since it is based on the greatest possible accumulation of depotentiated social units.”

“The first concern of any dictatorship is, consequently, to subjugate both labor and culture.”