The needs that are met by tyrants are as real as those to which freedom answers; sometimes they are more urgent. Tyrants promise security - and release from the tedium of everyday existence. To be sure, this is only a confused fantasy. The drab truth of tyranny is a life spent in waiting. But the perennial romance of tyranny comes from its promising its subjects a life more interesting than any they can contrive for themselves.
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The Unsaved: The Grand Inquisitor and Flying Fish (p. 124)John N. Gray
Not power not cruelty not death not winning not fighting not money not oil not war not sex not tyranny: all tyrants fall.
Martin Firrell
You may talk of the tyranny of Nero and Tiberius; but the real tyranny is the tyranny of your next-door neighbor... Public opinion is a permeating influence, and it exacts obedience to itself; it requires us to think other men's thoughts, to speak other men's words, to follow other men's habits.
Walter Bagehot
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. It would be easy, however, to destroy that good conscience by shouting to them: if you want the happiness of the people, let them speak out and tell what kind of happiness they want and what kind they don't want! But, in truth, the very ones who make use of such alibis know they are lies; they leave to their intellectuals on duty the chore of believing in them and of proving that religion, patriotism, and justice need for their survival the sacrifice of freedom.
Albert Camus
In terms of his 40 year now campaign in favor of Chairman Mao, Pol Pot, Slobodan Milošević, Osama bin Laden most lately, he is, as I say, thus an apologist for terror and tyranny, without rival. [...] Most people, including, by the way, his fellow travelers, like Robert Fisk, can say that America, even Robert Fisk in fact, that America, like all countries, has its moral highs and lows. America, I believe, has more moral highs than most. But he cannot see that. There's always a moral equivalence drawn between the worst tyrants in history and American presidents, even when American presidents have waged wars, just wars, to end tyranny.
Noam Chomsky
Off goes the head of the king, and tyranny gives way to freedom. The change seems abysmal. Then, bit by bit, the face of freedom hardens, and by and by it is the old face of tyranny. Then another cycle, and another. But under the play of all these opposites there is something fundamental and permanent — the basic delusion that men may be governed and yet be free.
H. L. Mencken
Gray, John N.
Gray, Macy
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