Quotes & Sayings About Autocracy

On occasions of this sort it was, I must admit, very pleasurable to be a monarch: to be able to get important things done by smothering stupid opposition with a single authoritative word. — Robert Graves

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

The disruptive powers of excessive national fecundity may have played a greater part in bursting the bonds of convention than either the power of ideas or the errors of autocracy. — John Maynard Keynes

In nation after nation, democracy has taken the place of autocracy. — John Charles Polanyi

Autocracy cannot do without its twin agents: a hangman and a priest, the first to suppress popular resistance by force, the second to sweeten and embellish the lot of the oppressed with empty promises of a heavenly kingdom. — Vladimir Lenin

Autocracy is a government of the few from above; Bolshevism is a government of the few from below. — Ameen Rihani

While American men are fighting to rid the old world of autocracy let American women set to and rid the new world of this intolerable old burden of sex ignorance. — Crystal Eastman

Watching both the health care and climate/energy debates in Congress, it is hard not to draw the following conclusion: There is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy, which is what we have in America today. One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. — Thomas Friedman

Power is always personal: any study of a Western democratic leader today reveals that, even in a transparent system with its short periods in office, personalities shape administrations. Democratic leaders often rule through trusted retainers instead of official ministers. In any court, power is as fluid as human personality. — Simon Sebag Montefiore

They realize that in thirty-four months we have built up new instruments of public power. In the hands of a peoples Government this power is wholesome and proper. But in the hands of political puppets of an economic autocracy such power would provide shackles for the liberties of the people. — Franklin D. Roosevelt

I have found many organizations that develop as many as three of the dimensions - they may have good service criteria, good economic criteria, and good human relations criteria, but they are not really committed to identifying, developing, utilizing, and recognizing the talent of people. And if these psychological forces are missing, the style will be a benevolent autocracy and the resulting culture will reflect different forms of collective resistance, adversarialism, excessive turnover, and other deep, chronic, cultural problems. — Stephen R. Covey

But if the teacher does little more than dictate that information and then demand that students memorize and parrot it on tests, they are not learning democratic values. Instead, they are learning to survive as subjects of an autocracy: keep your head down, your mouth shut, and repeat the party line whether or not you understand it or believe it. — Parker J. Palmer

Every nation has its war party. It is not the party of democracy. It is the party of autocracy. It seeks to dominate absolutely. — Robert M. La Follette, Sr.

Its heart was the alliance between the Romanovs and the nobility who needed royal support to control their estates. Serfdom was the foundation of this partnership. The ideal of autocracy was in practice a deal whereby the Romanovs enjoyed absolute power and delivered imperial glory while the nobility ruled their estates unchallenged. The — Simon Sebag Montefiore

No man has the right to rule over another man, otherwise such a right necessarily, and immediately becomes the right of the strongest. As the tiger in the jungle rules over the defenceless antelope, so on the banks of the Nile a Pharaoh ruled over the progenitors of the fellaheen of Egypt. Nor can a group of men, by contract, from their own right, compel you to obey a fellow-man. What binding force is there for me in the allegation that ages ago one of my progenitors made a 'Contrat Social,' with other men of that time? As man I stand free and bold, over against the most powerful of my fellow-men. I do not speak of the family, for here organic, natural ties rule; but in the sphere of the State I do not yield or bow down to anyone, who is man, as I am. — Abraham Kuyper

We took the simple step of illegalising all opposition. And the autobahn to autocracy lay clear. — Martin Amis

The Kingdom of Heaven is a military autocracy and there is no public opinion in it. — Anatole France

In tribal times, there were the medicine men. In the Middle Ages, there were the priests. Today, there are the lawyers. For every age, a group of bright boys, learned in their trades and jealous of their learning, who blend technical competence with plain and fancy hocus-pocus to make themselves masters of their fellow men. For every age, a pseudo-intellectual autocracy, guarding the tricks of the trade from the uninitiated, and running, after its own pattern, the civilization of its day. — Fred Rodell

In an autocracy, one person has his way; in an aristocracy, a few people have their way; in a democracy, no one has his way. — Celia Green

Who is fit to be elected?' asked Napoleon. 'A Caesar, an Alexander only comes along once a century, so that election must be a matter of chance. — Simon Sebag Montefiore

Orthodox churches, autocracy and national traditions are supposed to form a new national ideology in Russia. This would mean that Russia would be overtaken by its past, and our past would be our future. — Vladimir Sorokin

As to the people they have no understanding, and only repeat what their rulers are pleased to tell them" (Protagoras, 317); to get a doctrine accepted or rejected it is only necessary to have it praised or ridiculed in a popular play (a hit, no doubt, at Aristophanes, whose comedies attacked almost every new idea). Mob-rule is a rough sea for the ship of state to ride; every wind of oratory stirs up the waters and deflects the course. The upshot of such a democracy is tyranny or autocracy; the crowd so loves flattery, it is so "hungry for honey," that at last the wiliest and most unscrupulous flatterer, calling himself the "protector of the people" rises to supreme power (565). — Will Durant

It is acknowledged, namely, that there are in the world three forms of government, autocracy, oligarchy, and democracy: autocracies and oligarchies are administered according to the tempers of their lords, but democratic states according to established laws. — Aeschines

To the less privileged it was this arbitrariness that made the regime's power feel so oppressive. There were no clear principles or regulations which enabled the individual to challenge authority or the state. — Orlando Figes

If the situation demanded autocracy, I gave it autocracy. — Verghese Kurien

In Astrology, the moon, among its other meanings, has that of "the common people," who submit (they know not why) to any independent will that can express itself with sufficient energy. The people who guillotined the mild Louis XVI died gladly for Napoleon. The impossibility of an actual democracy is due to this fact of mob-psychology. As soon as you group men, they lose their personalities. A parliament of the wisest and strongest men in the nation is liable to behave like a set of schoolboys, tearing up their desks and throwing their inkpots at each other. The only possibility of co-operation lies in discipline and autocracy, which men have sometimes established in the name of equal rights. — Aleister Crowley

The doctrine of morals is an autonomy of practical reason, while the doctrine of virtue is at the same time an autocracy of practical reason. — Immanuel Kant

No outdoor sports can be more elegant than throwing stones at autocracy; no melees can be more exciting than those in cyberspace. — Ai Weiwei

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 A. Schumpeter

Take a look at the police and how they treat you,
Take a look at these corporations that cheat you.
Democrats and Republicans are all see-through.
Now we votin for the lesser of two evils ...
Man, don't let 'em deceive you.
This is an autocracy, not a democracy,
But to call this a democracy without mock interest
In the laws of society? That's called hypocrisy. — KRS-One

The Chinese, as befits a Communist autocracy, approached the task of dominating the Olympics with top-down military discipline. — Shashi Tharoor

The only way, they argued, to prevent a revolution was to rule Russia with an iron hand. This meant defending the autocratic principle, the unchecked powers of the police, the hegemony of the nobility, and the moral domination of the Church, against the liberal and secular challenges of the urban-industrialize order. — Orlando Figes

The autocracy was legitimized by its ever-expanding multi-faith, multi-ethnic empire, yet the later emperors regarded themselves as the leaders first of the Russian nation but then of the entire Slavic community. The more they embraced Russian nationalism, the more they excluded (and often persecuted) their huge non-Russian populations, — Simon Sebag Montefiore

Down with tyranny!' Bramble cried. 'Aristocracy! Autocracy! Monocracy! Other ocracy things! You are outnumbered, sir! Surrender! — Heather Dixon

The chief support of an autocracy is a standing army. The chief support of a democracy is an educated people. — Lotus Coffman

It would be folly to argue that the people cannot make political mistakes. They can and do make grave mistakes. They know it, they pay the penalty, but compared with the mistakes which have been made by every kind of autocracy they are unimportant. — Calvin Coolidge

A government with all this mass of favours to give or to withhold, however free in name, wields a power of bribery scarcely surpassed by an avowed autocracy, rendering it master of the elections in almost any circumstances but those of rare and extraordinary public excitement. — John Stuart Mill

Aside from the occasional genocide, oppression, evil and torture, etc., it is inarguable that public policy could be implemented more rapidly in an autocracy. — David Harsanyi

But the old 1840s split between the religious, patriotic, Slavophile establishment and the progressive, humane, revolutionary Westernizers was giving way to the exacerbated conflict between the alienated positivist radicals of the 1860s who adopted the name Turgenev had given them, Nihilists, and those who thanked Russian Nationalism, Orthodoxy and Autocracy for the bloodless liberation of the serfs, introduction of trial by jury, reduction of the draft from twenty-five to five years, partial decentralization of — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Liberty and Freedom are complex concepts. They go back to religious ideas of Free Will and are related to the Ruler Mystique implicit in absolute monarchs. Without absolute monarchs patterned after the Old Gods and ruling by the grace of a belief in religious indulgence, Liberty and Freedom would never have gained their present meaning. These ideals owe their very existence to past examples of oppression. And the forces that maintain such ideas will erode unless renewed by dramatic teaching or new oppressions. This is the most basic key to my life. — Frank Herbert

In the mind of the ordinary peasant the Tsar was not just a kingly ruler but a god on earth. He thought of him as a father-figure who knew all the peasants personally by name, understood their problems in all their minute details, and, if it were not for the evil boyars who surrounded him, would satisfy their demands. Hence the peasant tradition of sending direct appeals to the Tsar. — Orlando Figes

The American Conversation is an argument, after all, and way worse than our fear of error or anarchy or Gomorrahl decadence is our fear of theocracy or autocracy or any ideology whose project is not to argue or persuade but to adjourn the whole debate sine die. It's this logic (and perhaps this alone) that keeps protofascism or royalism or Maoism or any sort of really dire extremism from achieving mainstream legitimacy in US politics — David Foster Wallace

Free people were not ruled. Freedom had first to be valued before its existence could be demanded. — Terry Goodkind

It is often said, rather flatly, that Russian ballet was a mix of French, Scandinavian (through the teacher Johansson), and Italian sources - that Russia, through Petipa, absorbed all of these and made them her own. This is certainly true; but what really changed ballet was the way it became entwined with Imperial Russia herself. Serfdom and autocracy, St. Petersburg and the prestige of foreign culture, hierarchy, order, aristocratic ideals and their ongoing tension with more eastern folk forms: all of these things ran into ballet and made it a quintessentially Russian art. — Jennifer Homans

It seems that Russia today - dominated by, and accustomed to, autocracy and empire, and lacking strong civic institutions especially after the shattering of its society by the Bolshevik Terror - is destined to be ruled by self-promoting cliques for some time yet. — Simon Sebag Montefiore

Journalism is one of the devices whereby industrial autocracy keeps its control over political democracy; it is the day-by-day, between-elections propaganda, whereby the minds of the people are kept in a state of acquiescence, so that when the crisis of an election comes, they go to the polls and cast their ballots for either one of the two candidates of their exploiters. — Upton Sinclair

There is no better way to manage than by walking around. Autocracy doesn't work. Talk to people in their offices, find out what's on their minds. — Maurice Flanagan

The deadliest foe of democracy is not autocracy but liberty frenzied. — Otto Hermann Kahn

I would have to point out in the strongest terms the autocracy of the Liberal structure and the cowardice of its members. I have never seen in all my examination of politics so degrading a spectacle as that of all these Liberals turning their coats in unison with their Chief, when they saw the chance to take power. — Pierre Trudeau

The money power preys on the nation in times of peace, and conspires against it in times of adversity. It is more despotic than monarchy, more insolent than autocracy, more selfish than bureaucracy. It denounces, as public enemies, all who question its methods or throw light upon its crimes. — Abraham Lincoln

America posed a deeply interesting question to any Frenchmen with a political curiosity to ask it. How had Americans launched a revolution that aimed at establishing a free, stable, and constitutional government and made a success of it, while the French had in forty-one years lurched from absolute monarchy to constitutional monarchy, to the declaration of the republic, to mob rule, the Terror, the mass murder, and thence to a conservative republic, Napoleonic autocracy, the Bourbon restoration, further revolution, and the installation of an Orleanist constitutional monarchy? — Alan Ryan