Alexis de Tocqueville on the features of despotism

I seek to trace the novel features under which despotism may appear in the world.  The first thing that strikes the eye is an innumerable multitude of men, all equal and alike...  Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and watch over their fate.  That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild.  It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people whould rejoice, provided that they think of nothing but rejoicing.  For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry... what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and the trouble of living?

~ Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Volume 2

Chip Kusmaul on idealism and tyranny

Q: What are three appropriate ways to make your society an ideal one? 

A: Well, there’s a conundrum.  A society can’t be ideal, unless everyone thinks it’s ideal.  So, what if other people want something different than you?  Do you force them to comply with your ideal?  Do you consent to their ideal?  Neither one works for me.  The closest to an ideal society that we can hope to get, is one where everyone is free to pursue their own ideals. 

Remember that Hitler had ideals for society.  So did Stalin and Mao.  And they expected everyone to conform to their ideals.  In other words, they were tyrants.

~ Chip Kusmaul, MEd from Xavier University (1973), Quora, September 19, 2021

James Madison on tools of oppressors

Oppressors can tyrannize only when they achieve a standing army, an enslaved press, and a disarmed populace.

~ James Madison

James Madison
1894

James Madison on external enemies

If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.

~ James Madison

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn on resisting tyranny

And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family?   Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?…  The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!  If…if… We didn’t love freedom enough.  And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation….  We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.

~ Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

Charlton Heston on political correctness

To me, political correctness is tyranny, just tyranny with manners.

~ Charlton Heston

Benjamin Franklin on rebellion against tyranny

Rebellion against tyrants is obedience to God.

~ Benjamin Franklin

Burton Wheeler on despotism

Every despot has usurped the power of the legislative and judicial branches in the name of the necessity for haste to promote the general welfare of the masses—and then proceeded to reduce them to servitude.

~ Senator Burton K. Wheeler, Montana New Deal Democrat, referring to Franklin D. Roosevelt's attempt to pack the Supreme Court in the mid 1930s

William Penn on tyranny

Men must be ruled by God or they will be ruled by tyrants.

~ William Penn

Frederick Douglass on tryanny

The limitation of tyrants is the endurance of those they oppose.

~ Frederick Douglass

C.S. Lewis on the tyranny of good intentions

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

~ C.S. Lewis