Autocracy Quotes - page 2
I was interested by the idea that artists working in a totalitarian dictatorship or tsarist autocracy are secretly and slightly shamefully envied by artists who work in freedom. They have the gratification of intense interest: the authorities want to put them in jail, while there are younger readers for whom what they write is pure oxygen.
Tom Stoppard
And if I place so much emphasis on Spinoza, it is indeed not from any subjective preference (I have expressly omitted the objects of such a preference) or to establish him as master of a new autocracy, but because I could demonstrate by this example in a most striking and illuminating way my ideas about the value and dignity of mysticism and its relation to poetry. Because of his objectivity in this respect, I chose him as a representative of all the others.
Baruch Spinoza
Our magnanimous Imam (r. a.) managed to restore our dignity and eliminate the long-standing hegemony of autocracy and colonialism by returning to Islam, by adhering to Islam. He managed to give our people a sense of identity and made them feel that they can stand on their own feet, that they can say "yes" or "no" in the case of essential matters. Our people had been deprived of such things for centuries. It was Islam that gave these things to our people. In any country in any part of the world where the waves of Islamic Awakening are strengthened or started and the people and youth of that country feel that they are moving closer to Islam, there will be this renewed sense of identity and dignity.
Ali Khamenei
It is not true that democracy will always safeguard freedom of conscience better than autocracy. Witness the most famous of all trials. Pilate was, from the standpoint of the Jews, certainly the representative of autocracy. Yet he tried to protect freedom. And he yielded to a democracy.
Joseph Schumpeter
The money power preys upon the nation in times of peace, and it conspires against it in times of adversity. It's more despotic than monarchy. It's more insolent than autocracy. It's more selfish than bureaucracy. ... Corporations have been enthroned, and an era of corruption in high places will follow.
Abraham Lincoln
After 1917 the most hardened followers of the Tsar would come to denounce Stolypin as an upstart bureaucrat whose dangerous reform policies had only served to undermine the sacred principles of autocracy. But to his admirers - and there are many of them in post-Soviet Russia - Stolypin was the greatest statesmen Russia ever had, the one man who could have saved the country from the revolution and the civil war.
Pyotr Stolypin
It's not enough to speak with rhetorical flourish, of ennobling words of democracy, of freedom, equality, and liberty. All of us, including here in Poland, must do the hard work of democracy each and every day. My country as well. That's why-[applause]. That's why I came to Europe again this week with a clear and determined message for NATO, for the G-7, for the European Union, for all freedom-loving nations: We must commit now to be in this fight for the long haul. We must remain unified today and tomorrow and the day after and for the years and decades to come. It will not be easy. There will be costs. But it's a price we have to pay. Because the darkness that drives autocracy is ultimately no match for the flame of liberty that lights the souls of free people everywhere.
Joe Biden
