Death is better, a milder fate than tyranny. - Aeschylus
Under conditions of tyranny it is far easer to act than to think.
In your absolute defiance against tyranny, lies and all odds; lies therein, your true moral strength. Rise! - Mamur Mustapha
Tyranny is the exercise of some power over a man, which is not warranted by law, or necessary for the public safety. A people can never be deprived of their liberties, while they retain in their own hands, a power sufficient to any other power in the state. - Noah Webster
Democracy imposed from without is the severest form of tyranny.
What art seeks to disturb is monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine. - Oscar Wilde
I am a strong believer in the tyranny, the dictatorship, the absolute authority of the writer. - Philip Pullman
Bring it up, make amends, forgive yourself. It sounds simple, but don’t think for a second that it is easy. Getting free from the tyranny of past mistakes can be hard work, but definitely worth the effort. And the payoff is health, wholeness and inner peace. In other words, you get your life back. - Steve Goodier
When we are capable of living in the moment free from the tyranny of "shoulds," free from the nagging sensation that this moment isn't right, we will have peaceful hearts.
Enclosed within the tyranny of our minds and there is where we are lost. - Robert Dodson
Tyranny and fantasy both like to write everyone else's lines. - James Richardson
Speak against unconscious oppression,Speak against the tyranny of the unimaginative,Speak against bonds. - Ezra Pound
Tyranny cannot defeat the power of ideas. - Helen Keller
Of all forms of tyranny the least attractive and the most vulgar is the tyranny of mere wealth, the tyranny of plutocracy. - Theodore Roosevelt
The same state of the passions which fits the multitude, who have not sufficient stock of reason and knowledge to guide them, for opposition to tyranny and oppression, very naturally leads them to a contempt and disregard of all authority. - Alexander Hamilton
I do oppose my patience to his fury, and am arm'd to suffer with a quietness of spirit, the very tyranny and rage of his. - William Shakespeare
Why should I fear death?If I am, then death is not.If Death is, then I am not.Why should I fear that which can only exist when I do not?Long time men lay oppressed with slavish fear.Religious tyranny did domineer.At length the mighty one of GreeceBegan to assent the liberty of man. - Epicurus
Without order as a foundation, the cry for freedom is nothing more than the attempt of some group or another to achieve its own ends. When actually carried out in practice, that cry for freedom will inevitably express itself in tyranny. - Prince Klemens von Metternich
Tyranny begins with the laws of grammar. - Marty Rubin
Conservatism is the antidote to tyranny. It's the only one. It's based on thousands of years of human experience. There is nothing narrow about the conservative philosophy. It's a liberating philosophy. It is a magnificent philosophy. It is a philosophy for the ages, for all times. - Mark R. Levin
There is no crueler tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of law and in the name of justice.
I believe that God has planted in every human heart the desire to live in freedom. And even when that desire is crushed by tyranny for decades, it will rise again. - George W. Bush
Enlighten the people, generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like spirits at the dawn of day. - Thomas Jefferson
The function of music is to release us from the tyranny of conscious thought. - Sir Thomas Beecham
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
When the government fears the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. - Thomas Jefferson
But as fast as geography is coming under our control, the clock is exerting more and more tyranny over us. - Pico Iyer
The best government is a benevolent tyranny tempered by an occasional assassination. - Voltaire
The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants, and it provides the further advantage of giving the servants of tyranny a good conscience. - Albert Camus
The distrust of wit is the beginning of tyranny. - Edward Abbey
Like works of literature, mathematical ideas help expand our circle of empathy, liberating us from the tyranny of a single, parochial point of view. - Daniel Tammet Thinking in Numbers How Maths Illuminates Our Lives
If people let government decide what foods they eat and what medicines they take, their bodies will soon be in as sorry a state as are the souls of those who live under tyranny. - Thomas Jefferson
Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think. - Hannah Arendt
If newspapers are useful in overthrowing tyrants, it is only to establish a tyranny of their own. - James Fenimore Cooper
Equality cannot be imagined outside of tyranny. - Charles Forbes René de Montalembert
…all the evils of ours spring from the tyranny of human beings. - George Orwell
Only tyranny fears the full expression of liberty. - José Martí
Where the people fear the government you have tyranny; where the government fears the people, you have liberty. - William Feather
Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate. - Bertrand Russell
Silence is golden...but in times of tyranny it is blood red - Parag Tipnis
He mobilized the English language and sent it into battle to steady his fellow countrymen and hearten those Europeans upon whom the long dark night of tyranny had descended. - Edward R. Murrow
No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets. - Edward Abbey
Justice without mercy is tyranny - E'Jéi Osborne
Fragile as reason is and limited as law is as the institutionalised medium of reason, that's all we have between us and the tyranny of mere will and the cruelty of unbridled, undisciplined feelings. - Felix Frankfurter
Tyranny is always better organized than freedom. - Charles Péguy
In reality, though, the first thing to ask of history is that it should pointout to us the paths of liberty. The great lesson to draw from revolutions isnot that they devour humanity but rather that tyranny never fails to generatethem. - Pierre Trudeau
Withholding information is the essence of tyranny. Control of the flow of information is the tool of the dictatorship. - Bruce Coville
One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny. - Bertrand Russell
There are few minds to which tyranny is not delightful. - Samuel Johnson
Make no mistake about it: Operation Desert Storm truly was a victory of good over evil, of freedom over tyranny, of peace over war. - Dan Quayle
Of all human ills, greatest is fortune's wayward tyranny. - Sophocles
Priesthood, Imamhood, Pundithood often come hand in hand with tyranny. - Abhijit Naskar
So long as tyranny exists, in whatever form, man's deepest aspiration must resist it as inevitably as man must breathe. - Emma Goldman
The Postmodernists' tyranny wears people down by boredom and semi-literate prose. - Christopher Hitchens
Babylon violated diminishes Alexander; Rome enslaved diminishes Caesar; massacred Jerusalem diminishes Titus. Tyranny follows the tyrant. Woe to the man who leaves behind a shadow that bears his form. - Victor Hugo
The government in a revolution is the despotism of liberty against tyranny - Maximilien Robespierre
... you can't start with a democracy. You have to work up through stuff like tyranny and monarchy first. That way people are so relived when they get to democracy that they hang on to it. - John Steinbeck
Tyranny is the wolf cast by the shadows of sheep. - Stefan Molyneux
It seems to me there's this tyranny that's not accidental or incidental, to make women feel compelled to look like somebody they're not. I think the effort is being made to get us to turn our time and attention to this instead of important political issues. - Eve Ensler
Absolute autonomy inevitably leads to tyranny. - Jack Provonsha
No rules for the rulers is tyranny for the subjects. Freedom for politicians is enslavement for citizens. - Stefan Molyneux
One god, one truth, one vision for humanity is tyranny. - Marty Rubin
Memory is a political act. Forgetfulness is the handmaiden of tyranny. - James Carroll
Our liberty will not be secured at the sword's point... We must secure it by making ourselves worthy of it. And when the people reaches that height, God will provide a weapon, the idols will be shattered, tyranny will crumble like a house of cards, and liberty will shine out like the first dawn. - José Rizal
Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny. Free men pull in all kinds of directions. - Terry Pratchett
A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny. - Alexander Solzhenitsyn
The means of defence agst. foreign danger, have been always the instruments of tyranny at home. - James Madison
I don't think it really matters whether parents are strict or lenient, as long as they're consistent. Kids can live with more or less any set of rules so long as they know what they are. It's arbitrary tyranny that gets them mixed up. - Ken Follett
Does the fact that I can no longer remember my own phone number indicate my growing feebleness? No, on the contrary, it unleashes the mind from the petty tyranny of tending to the trivial and allows it to concentrate on the important and the critical. - Don Norman
All that technical expertise isn't worth a damn if you don't get the best out of people, though. . . . These were leaders who saw strength in ordinary people and showed them how to break tyranny. - Noël Coward
It is really exhausting to live in a dictatorship of 'Me', which is basically a tyranny of others. - Stefan Molyneux
Any appeasement of tyranny is treason to this republic and to the democratic ideal. - William Allen White
The right to vote is a *consequence*, not a primary cause, of a free social system -- and its value depends on the constitutional structure implementing and strictly delimiting the voters' power; unlimited majority rule is an instance of the principle of tyranny. - Ayn Rand
Taxation without representation is tyranny. - James Otis
One should as a rule respect public opinion in so far as is necessary to avoid starvation and to keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny, and is likely to interfere with happiness in all kinds of ways. - Bertrand Russell
EMANCIPATION, n. A bondman's change from the tyranny of another to the despotism of himself. He was a slave: at word he went and came; His iron collar cut him to the bone. Then Liberty erased his owner's name, Tightened the rivets and inscribed his own. G.J. - Ambrose Bierce
Bad law is the worst sort of tyranny. - Edmund Burke
Power in defense of freedom is greater than power on behalf of tyranny and oppression. - Malcolm X
To all the revolutionaries fighting to throw off the yoke of tyranny around the world: look at British democracy. Is that what you want? - Andy Zaltzman
I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man. - Thomas Jefferson
ORATORY, n. A conspiracy between speech and action to cheat the understanding. A tyranny tempered by stenography. - Ambrose Bierce
Time to read is always time stolen. (Like time to write, for that matter, or time to love.)Stolen from what? From the tyranny of living. - Daniel Pennac
Tyranny is like the electric wiring in an old house. A tyrant dies, the new tyrant takes possession, and all he has to do is drop the switch. - John le Carré