Dictatorship Quotes - Page 20

• Democracy appears to me potentially a higher form of political organization than any kind of dictatorship. But if it turns out that in America, which could afford a decent living for everyone, the comfortable majority is willing to condone the misery and abuse of a minority for an indefinite period, the exploitation by the majority becomes as repugnant as exploitation by an oligarchy, and democracy loses half its supposed superiority.

  Benjamin Spock

  Organization, America, Political

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• The dictatorship is shut up, democracy is always concerned.

  Woody Allen

  Democracy, Shut Up, Concerned

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• Of course you have a duty to show the disfigurations of society as well as its more agreeable aspects. But if TV in the western world uses its freedom continually to show all that is worst in our society, while the centrally controlled television of the Communist world and the dictatorships show only what is judged advantageous to them and suppress everything else, how are the uncommitted to judge between us? How can they fail to misjudge if they view matters only through a distorted mirror?

  Margaret Thatcher

  Mirrors, Views, Judging

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• Once the philosophical foundation of democracy has collapsed, the statement that dictatorship is bad is rationally valid only for those who are not its beneficiaries, and there is no theoretical obstacle to the transformation of this statement into its opposite.

  Max Horkheimer

  Philosophical, Democracies Have, Opposites

  Max Horkheimer (2013). “Eclipse of Reason”, p.19, A&C Black

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• I sing against emotional dictatorships, and against the imposition of one person over another, in the name of love.

  Concha Buika

  Emotional, Names, Persons

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• 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.

  Mao Zedong

  People, Chinese, Speak

  Zedong Mao (1971). “Mao Tse-tung: An Anthology of His Writings”

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• Cincinnatus was ploughing his four jugera of land upon the Vaticanian Hill, the same that are still known as the Quintian Meadows, when the messenger brought him the dictatorship, finding him, the tradition says, stripped to the work.

  Pliny the Elder

  Land, Ploughing, Four

  Pliny the Elder (2015). “Delphi Complete Works of Pliny the Elder (Illustrated)”, p.845, Delphi Classics

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• China is now suffering from poverty, not from unequal distribution of wealth. Where there are inequalities of wealth, the methods of Marx can, of course, be used; a class war can be advocated to destroy the inequalities. But in China, where industry is not yet developed, Marx's class war and dictatorship of the proletariat are impracticable.

  Sun Yat-sen

  War, Class, Suffering

  "Capital and the State". Book by Sun Yat-sen, 1924.

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• The people on the streets of Egypt and Tunisia and Libya and Syria and Iran have done more to defeat the ideology of Al Qaeda than anything that the United States has done. They have shown that there is a third way, that with peaceful protest you can have an end to dictatorship and a role for human dignity, a role for your religious faith in society.

  Reza Aslan

  Religious, Egypt, Iran

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• Two world wars, three monstrous dictatorships-in Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, Red China-plus every lesser variant of devastating socialist experimentation in a global spread of brutality and despair, have not prompted modern intellectuals to question or revise their dogma. They still think that it is daring, idealistic and unconventional to denounce the rich. They still believe that money is the root of all evil-except government money, which is the solution to all problems.

  Ayn Rand

  War, Believe, Thinking

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• What is Time... That you speak of it so subserviently? Are we to be the slaves of the sun, that second-hand, overrated knob of gilt, or of his sister, that fatuous circle of silver paper? A curse upon their ridiculous dictatorship!

  Mervyn Peake

  Time, Hands, Circles

  Mervyn Peake (2007). “Titus Groan”, p.239, The Overlook Press

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• The world has witnessed the rise and fall of monarchy, the rise and fall of dictatorship, the rise and fall of feudalism, the rise and fall of communism, and the rise of democracy; and now we are witnessing the fall of democracy... the theme of the evolution of life continues, sweeping away with it all that does not blossom into perfection.

  Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

  Fall, Perfection, Democracy

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• We insist on producing a farm surplus, but think the government should find a profitable market for it. We overindulge in speculation, but ask the government to prevent panics. Now the only way to hold the government entirely responsible for conditions is to give up our liberty for a dictatorship. If we continue the more reasonable practice of managing our own affairs we must bear the burdens of our own mistakes. A free people cannot shift their responsibility for them to the government. Self-government means self-reliance.

  Calvin Coolidge

  Giving Up, Mistake, Responsibility

  Calvin Coolidge (1972). “Calvin Coolidge says: dispatches written by former-president Coolidge and syndicated to newspapers in 1930-1931 : gathered for issuance in book form on the one-hundredth anniversary of Mr. Coolidge's birth, 4 July 1972”

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• I worry about a democracy having nuclear weapons as much as a dictatorship having nuclear weapons.

  Mohamed ElBaradei

  Worry, Democracy, Nuclear

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