Tyrants

Thus always to tyrants!

Those hours that with gentle work did frame the lovely gaze where every eye does dwell will play the tyrants to the very same and that unfair which fairly does excel.

Wake up, Romanian, from your deadly slumber, in which barbaric tyrants kept you so long by force! Now or never is the time for you to have a new fate, which should command respect of even your cruel enemies.

It is an old strategy of tyrants to delude their victims into fighting their battles for them.

The universal right to speak your mind and to protest against authority, to live in a society that’s open and free, that can criticize a President without retribution — a country where you're judged by the content of your character rather than what you look like, or how you worship, or what your last name is, or where your family came from — that's what separates us from tyrants and terrorists.

Of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants.

Tyrants are all alike; it is only the arguments they use to justify their rule that differ.

Despite a flattering supposition to the contrary, people come readily to terms with power. There is little reason to think that the power of the great bankers, while they were assumed to have it, was much resented. But as the ghosts of numerous tyrants, from Julius Caesar to Benito Mussolini will testify, people are very hard on those who, having had power, lose it or are destroyed. Then anger at past arrogance is joined with contempt for the present weakness. The victim or his corpse is made to suffer all available indignities.

It now seemed certain to the Third Men that the Great Brains would very soon be impotent, and the planet once more under the control of natural beings. But the tyrants were not to be so easily defeated. Already for some centuries they had been secretly experimenting with a means of gaining a far more thorough dominion over the natural species. At the eleventh hour they succeeded.

Tyrants hate transparency.