Quotes about tyranny

Death is softer by far than tyranny.

— Aeschylus

In every tyrant's heart there springs in the end this poison, that he cannot trust a friend.

— Aeschylus

Tyranny and anarchy are never far apart.

— Jeremy Bentham

The most insupportable of tyrannies is that of inferiors.

— Napoleon Bonaparte

No totalitarians, no wars, no fears, famines or perils of any kind can really break a man's spirit until he breaks it himself by surrendering. Tyranny has many dread powers, but not the power to rule the spirit.

— Edgar Sheffield Brightman

The tyrant grinds down his slaves and they don't turn against him, they crush those beneath them.

— Emily Bronte

Tyrants seldom want pretexts.

— Edmund Burke

Kings will be tyrants from policy, when subjects are rebels from principle.

— Edmund Burke

If we must have a tyrant, let him at least be a gentleman who has been bred to the business, and let us fall by the axe and not by the butcher's cleaver.

— Lord Byron

There is a secret pride in every human heart that revolts at tyranny. You may order and drive an individual, but you cannot make him respect you.

— William Hazlitt

So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, the Caesars and Napoleons will arise to make them miserable.

— Aldous Huxley

Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God.

— Thomas Jefferson

I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.

— Thomas Jefferson

No government power can be abused long. Mankind will not bear it. There is a remedy in human nature against tyranny, that will keep us safe under every form of government.

— Samuel Johnson

A police state finds that it cannot command the grain to grow.

— John F. Kennedy

The tyrant dies and his rule is over, the martyr dies and his rule begins.

— Søren Kierkegaard

Tyranny is yielding to the lust of the governing.

— Lord Moulton

Tyranny is always better organized than freedom.

— Charles Peguy

Like Cato, give his little senate laws, and sit attentive to his own applause.

— Alexander Pope

Rulers, who neither see, nor feel, nor know, but leech-like to their fainting country cling, till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow, -- a people starved and stabbed in the untilled field...

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

There is no week nor day nor hour when tyranny may not enter upon this country, if the people lose their roughness and spirit of defiance.

— Walt Whitman

The worst form of tyranny the world has ever known the tyranny of the weak over the strong. It is the only tyranny that lasts.

— Oscar Wilde

The people always have some champion whom they set over them and nurse into greatness. This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector.

— Plato