Quotes & Sayings About Bad Rulers

Men change their rulers willingly, hoping to better themselves, and this hope induces them to take up arms against him who rules, wherein they are deceived because they afterward find by experience they have gone from bad to worse. — Niccolo Machiavelli

In this world, therefore, the dominion of good men is profitable, not so much for themselves as for human affairs. But the dominion of bad men is hurtful chiefly to themselves who rule, for they destroy their own souls by greater license in wickedness; while those who are put under them in service are not hurt except by their own iniquity. For to the just all the evils imposed on them by unjust rulers are not the punishment of crime, but the test of virtue. Therefore the good man, although he is a slave, is free; but the bad man, even if he reigns, is a slave, and that not of one man, but, what is far more grievous, of as many masters as he has vices; of which vices when the divine Scripture treats, it says, For of whom any man is overcome, to the same he is also the bond-slave. — Augustine Of Hippo

Being an absolute ruler today was not as simple as people thought. At least, it was not simple if your ambitions included being an absolute ruler tomorrow. There were subtleties. Oh, you could order men to smash down doors and drag people off the dungeons without trial, but too much of that sort of thing lacked style and anyway was bad for business, habit-forming and very, very dangerous for your health. A thinking tyrant, it seemed to Vetinari, had a much harder job than a ruler raised to power by some idiot vote-yourself-rich system like democracy. At least they could tell the people he was their fault. — Terry Pratchett

A democratic state begins from the assumption that most of those who gravitate toward power are mediocre and probably immoral. It assumes that we must always protect ourselves from bad government. We must be prepared for the worst leaders even as we hope for the best. And as Karl Popper wrote, this understanding leads to a new approach to power, for it forces us to replace the question: Who shall rule? By the new question: How can we so organize political institutions that bad or incompetent rulers can be prevented from doing too much damage? — Chris Hedges

Over the years our mother has beaten us with belts, shoes, rulers, extension cords, hair brushes, a wooden spoon, a fly swatter, a toilet brush, wire coat hangers, wooden coat hangers and sometimes one of our own toys. When you get whacked by your own paddleball paddle or you have to watch your sister getting spanked with a badminton racquet that she asked Santa Claus (AKA Grandma) to bring, you don't feel much like playing with those things ever again. — Bob Thurber

Who does not know that kings and rulers sprang from men who were ignorant of God, who assumed because of blind greed and intolerable presumption to make themselves masters of other men, their equals, by means of pride, violence, bad faith, murder, and almost every other kind of crime? Surely the devil drove them on. — Pope Gregory VII

for men change their rulers willingly, hoping to better themselves, and this hope induces them to take up arms against him who rules: wherein they are deceived, because they afterwards find by experience they have gone from bad to worse. This — Niccolo Machiavelli

fundamentally, people do not prefer independent thought and the accompanying responsibility, but rather orders, subordination, and the accompanying exemption from responsibility. In a popular democracy, the masses who elect unfit rulers are to blame for bad government, but that is not the case in a monarchy. Rather than reflecting upon their own mistakes, the people are free to enjoy speaking ill of leaders who are even more irresponsible than they. — Yoshiki Tanaka

The desire of Kenyans is manifest. They know too well that their invincible, invisible, nameless, faceless, yet omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent rulers are condemned to serve them for life! — Levi Cheruo Cheptora

The imperative to develop new technologies and implement them on a heroic scale no longer seems like the childish preoccupation of a few nerds with slide rulers - It's the only way for the human race to escape from its current predicaments - Too bad we've forgotten how to do it — Neal Stephenson

It is not enough to make good laws;
they must be enforced.
It is not enough to denounce bad laws;
they must be changed.
The better the laws the more righteous the judgments.
The wiser the rulers are the more prosperous a nation. — Matshona Dhliwayo

If you love freedom, if you think the human condition is dignified by privacy, by the right to be left alone, by the right to explore your weird ideas provided you don't hurt others, then you have common cause with the kids whose web-browsers and cell phones are being used to lock them up and follow them around.
If you believe that the answer to bad speech is more speech - not censorship - then you have a dog in the fight.
If you believe in a society of laws, a land where our rulers have to tell us the rules, and have to follow them too, then you're part of the same struggle that kids fight when they argue for the right to live under the same Bill of Rights that adults have. — Cory Doctorow

It is the responsibility of good people to rise against bad rulers. — Abram Gitspof

The world's rulers should be forced to take a reader's license. Only when they have read five thousand - no, make that ten thousand - books will they be anywhere near qualified to understand humans and how they behave. I often felt better, no longer so bad, fake and unfaithful, when Jean read me bits where good people did nasty things out of love or necessity or their hunger for life. — Nina George