55 Quotes About Despotism

I love my country, not my government.

We are not to expect to be translated from despotism to liberty in a featherbed.

The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading subjugation on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it: for man is an imitative animal.

Ethics and oversight are what you eliminate when you want absolute power.

Europeans have sometimes been beguiled by a despotism that comes concealed in the seductive form of an ideal – as it did in the cases of Hitler and Stalin. This fact may remind us that the possibility of despotism is remote neither in space nor in time.

Fear is the State's psychological weapon of choice to frighten citizens into sacrificing their basic freedoms and rule-of-law protections in exchange for the security promised by their all-powerful government.

In my understanding, there are a number of souls, particularly those of the crowd, who are forever subconsciously looking for a mere human system or human being to be a godlike figure for the masses: one to wear the crown, to take the throne...which is why it seems for the lives of them they can barely cope when they feel the wrong one is holding that throne.

As a nation, we began by declaring that 'all men are created equal.' We now practically read it 'all men are created equal, except negroes.' When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read 'all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.' When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty – to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.

When the Rule of Law disappears, we are ruled by the whims of men.