TYRANNY

Related Subjects: Censorship, Cruelty, Despotism, Dictatorship, Government, Kings, Persecution, Rule, Slavery

1. Any excuse will serve a tyrant.—AESOP, The Wolf and the Lamb
   

2. A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider god-fearing and pious. On the other hand, they do less easily move against him, believing that he has the gods on his side.—ARISTOTLE, Politics
   

3. Kings will be tyrants from policy, when subjects are rebels from principle.—BURKE, Reflections on the Revolution in France
   

4. These men who do not die, but send to death,
   These iron men whom mercy cannot bend
   Beyond the lettered law; what when their breath
   Shall suddenly and naturally end?
   What shall their final retribution be,
   What bloody silver then shall pay the tolls
   Exacted for this legal infamy
   When death indicts their stark immortal souls?—COUNTEE CULLEN, Not Sacco and Vanzetti
   

5. Tyranny is a habit capable of being developed, and at last becomes a disease.—DOSTOYEVSKY, The House of the Dead
   

6. The man and the citizen disappear for ever in the tyrant.—DOSTOYEVSKY, The House of the Dead
   

7. Of all the tyrannies on human kind
   The worst is that which persecutes the mind.—DRYDEN, The Hind & the Panther
   

8. With reasonable men, I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter, nor waste arguments where they will certainly be lost.—W. L. GARRISON, Life
   

9. Excess of severity is not the path to order. On the contrary, it is the path to the bomb.—JOHN MORLEY, Recollections
   

10. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.—THOMAS PAINE, The Crisis
    

11. For how can tyrants safely govern home,
    Unless abroad they purchase great alliance?—SHAKESPEARE, Henry VI
    

12. And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed.—JOHN STEINBECK, The Grapes of Wrath
    

13. No matter what the dominant idea may be, whenever it has recourse to terror as the instrument for imposing uniformity upon alien convictions, it is no longer idealism but brutality.—STEFAN ZWEIG, The Right to Heresy