Tyranny Quotes – Reflections on Power and Authority

"The government is best which makes itself unnecessary."

Wilhelm von Humboldt

"If we remain fearful, then we will be further stripped of power as we barrel towards this neofeudalistic state where there is a world of masters and serfs, a kind of permanent underclass. That's what's happening; that's what's being created. Rapacious corporate business interests have shattered all kinds of regulations and controls. They have carried out a coup d'etat in slow motion. And it's over; they've won."

Chris Hedges

"The question is not how to get good people to rule; THE QUESTION IS: HOW TO STOP THE POWERFUL from doing as much damage as they can to us."

Karl Popper

"Quite frankly, having an uninformed populace works extremely well, particularly when you have a media that doesn't understand its responsibility and feels more like it's an arm of a political party. They can really take advantage of an uninformed populace."

Ben Carson

"The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion."

Albert Camus

"Every time I hear a political speech or I read those of our leaders, I am horrified at having, for years, heard nothing which sounded human. It is always the same words telling the same lies. And the fact that men accept this, that the people’s anger has not destroyed these hollow clowns, strikes me as proof that men attribute no importance to the way they are governed; that they gamble – yes, gamble – with a whole part of their life and their so called 'vital interests."

Albert Camus

"Of course, the judiciary is to a considerable extent politically occupied, and every jurist should know this, even if many now suppress it due to political fanaticism. Question: What is the 3rd state exam in the judiciary? Answer: the party book"

Markus Haintz

"The majority of those who are loosely identified by the term 'liberals' are afraid to let themselves discover that what they advocate is statism. They want to keep all the advantages and effects of capitalism, while destroying the cause, and they want to establish statism without its necessary effects. They do not want to know or to admit that they are the champions of dictatorship and slavery."

Ayn Rand

"I do not wish to be either governor nor governed!"

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

"A society that robs an individual of the product of his effort ... is not strictly speaking a society, but a mob held together by institutionalized gang violence."

Ayn Rand

"It is curious that people tend to regard government as a quasi-divine, selfless, Santa Claus organization. Government was constructed neither for ability nor for the exercise of loving care; government was built for the use of force and for necessarily demagogic appeals for votes. If individuals do not know their own interests in many cases, they are free to turn to private experts for guidance. It is absurd to say that they will be served better by a coercive, demagogic apparatus."

Murray Rothbard

"Whatever the label on the parties, or the war cries issuing from the demagogues who lead them, the practical choice is between the plutocracy on the one side and a rabble of preposterous impossibilists on the other."

H. L. Mencken

"The press needs to have the freedom to say all so that certain people don’t have the freedom to do all."

Stewart Alsop

"This concern with the basic condition of freedom -- the absence of physical constraint -- is unquestionably necessary, but is not all that is necessary. It is perfectly possible for a man to be out of prison and yet not free -- to be under no physical constraint and yet to be a psychological captive, compelled to think, feel and act as the representatives of the national State, or of some private interest within the nation, want him to think, feel and act."

Aldous Huxley

"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule."

Henry Louis Mencken

"Those who decide are not elected, and those who are elected have nothing to decide."

Horst Seehofer

"There are, after all, two ways of exercising power, so to speak. One is the old way, the one we all know: oppression.

We saw that under Stalinism and the like.

And then, here in the West, I’ve come to know another form that I hadn’t really thought about before.

That is seduction.

Seduction is something truly insidious. Because at least you can defend yourself against paternalism and tyranny.

Then you remain a subject.

It may crush you; it may kill you. You may have to spend your whole life under terrible conditions.

But you remain a subject. You can say: “I am, here I stand, I cannot do otherwise.”

Someone who has been seduced stands there and has no idea where they are.

They protect their seducers.

“Oh, then we can’t take our next vacation on a cruise ship after all. And how are we supposed to manage now that gas keeps getting more expensive?”—that’s how the demands of the seduced person come across.

And someone like that will, of course, always contribute to maintaining the system of seduction.

And that’s why turning people into the seduced is a much surer way of securing power than oppressing them.

The Church, by the way, knew this all along."

Gerald Hüther

"You can't give the government the power to do good without also giving it the power to do bad - in fact, to do anything it wants."

Harry Edson Browne