Our defense is in the preservation of the spirit which prizes liberty as a heritage of all men, in all lands, everywhere. Destroy this spirit and you have planted the seeds of despotism around your own doors.
Abraham Lincoln
When the white man governs himself, that is self-government; but when he governs himself and also governs another man, that is more than self-government - that is despotism.
Real liberty is neither found in despotism or the extremes of democracy, but in moderate governments.
Alexander Hamilton
The doctrine of blind obedience and unqualified submission to any human power, whether civil or ecclesiastical, is the doctrine of despotism, and ought to have no place among Republicans and Christians.
Angelina Grimke
Never may a man prone to believe scandal be a despot or a popular leader! Under his guidance, democracy itself will be despotism.
Apollonius of Tyana
Despotism isn't nearly as bad as it's cracked up to be.
Arabella Weir
Republics decline into democracies and democracies degenerate into despotisms.
Aristotle
When I'm making something, I've always felt in charge and therefore able to call the shots. But what you've got to do is stop that turning into arrogance or despotism!
Armando Iannucci
Equality, rightly understood as our founding fathers understood it, leads to liberty and to the emancipation of creative differences; wrongly understood, as it has been so tragically in our time, it leads first to conformity and then to despotism.
Barry Goldwater
Each man has an equal social right to multiply his power of motion by all the social factors of civilization. Private property in any of these factors is inconsistent with this fundamental right; it must, obviously, prove a source of economic despotism and industrial slavery.
Daniel De Leon
Whatever government is not a government of laws, is a despotism, let it be called what it may.
Daniel Webster
To add to our misery and despair, a bloated aristocracy has sent to China - the greatest and oldest despotism in the world - for a cheap working slave.
Denis Kearney
Their poverty secured their freedom, since our desires and our possessions are the strongest fetters of despotism.
Edward Gibbon
The more complete the despotism, the more smoothly all things move on the surface.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Is not liberty the destruction of all despotism - including, of course, legal despotism?
Frederic Bastiat
The revolutionary government is the despotism of liberty against tyranny.
Georg Buchner
The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism.
George Washington
Small natures require despotism to exercise their sinews, as great souls thirst for equality to give play to their heart.
Honore de Balzac
Equating brutality and despotism with leadership is not an American value.
Jake Tapper
Unlike despotisms, modern democracies are not supposed promiscuously to accumulate property and then charge their taxpayers to maintain it. But that is what they do. Governments are always trying to extend their responsibilities and their estates, and it is very hard for parliaments to reign them in.
James Buchan
Despotism can only exist in darkness, and there are too many lights now in the political firmament to permit it to remain anywhere, as it has heretofore done, almost everywhere.
The despotism of custom is everywhere the standing hindrance to human advancement.
Whatever crushes individuality is despotism, by whatever name it may be called and whether it professes to be enforcing the will of God or the injunctions of men.
Man is insatiable for power; he is infantile in his desires and, always discontented with what he has, loves only what he has not. People complain of the despotism of princes; they ought to complain of the despotism of man.
Any government, that is its own judge of, and determines authoritatively for the people, what are its own powers over the people, is an absolute government of course. It has all the powers that it chooses to exercise. There is no other or at least no more accurate definition of a despotism than this.
I am astonished but not discouraged by my enormous responsibility. Devoted both from affection and duty to the cause of the people, I shall combat with equal ardor aristocracy, despotism, and faction.
Protestants in France are under intolerable despotism. Although open persecution does not now exist, yet it depends upon the whim of the king, queen, parliament, or any of the ministry.
Religions are the cradles of despotism.
Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism.
At its best, management theory is part of the democratic promise of America. It aims to replace the despotism of the old bosses with the rule of scientific law. It offers economic power to all who have the talent and energy to attain it.
Freedom of conscience entails more dangers than authority and despotism.
Throwing off despotism and tyranny is our history and part of our national identity - something in which we can take incredible pride.
I do not want history to record me as someone who has bequeathed to his nation the institution of despotism.
Democracy passes into despotism.
Despotism is the only form of government which may with safety to itself, neglect the education of its infant poor.
We should not underestimate that: the Chinese people's ignorance. Thousands of years of despotism had been such a poison that their understanding of modern politics is even inferior to that of the black slaves and other immigrants.
Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of liberty.
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 submissions on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it.
Force is the vital principle and immediate parent of despotism.
The strength and power of despotism consists wholly in the fear of resistance.
Despotism is a long crime.
The Hungarians, by nature, are not extreme. They become more extreme only when they are forced to fight for their freedom, as was in the case in the uprising against the communists in 1956 or the revolution against the Austrian Empire. They will not turn extreme in the name of despotism.
