Neo-Tyrants

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"Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God."

-Thomas Jefferson

"A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny."

-Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

"This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector."

-Plato

"If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy."

-James Madison

"The people never give up their liberties, but under some delusion."

-Edmund Burke

"Cruelty is a tyrant that's always attended with fear."

-Thomas Fuller

"Remember that it is not by a tyrant's words, but only by his deeds that we can know him."

-Dwight D. Eisenhower

"The offspring of riches: Pride, vanity, ostentation, arrogance, tyranny."

-Mark Twain

"All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent."

-Thomas Jefferson

"Abuse of power isn't limited to bad guys in other nations. It happens in our own country if we’re not vigilant."

-Clint Eastwood

"The plea of necessity, that eternal argument of all conspirators."

-William Henry Harrison

"Beware of those who would use violence, too often it is violence they want and neither truth nor freedom."

-Louise Lamour

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“Political language. . . is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

-George Orwell

"Moral cowardice and intellectual corruption are the natural concomitants of unchallenged privilege."

-Noam Chompsky

"Tis time to fear when tyrants seem to kiss."

-William Shakespeare

"The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe with blood for centuries."

-James Madison

"The cost of liberty is less than the cost of repression."

-W. E. B. Du Bois

"There is no crueler tyranny than that which is perpetuated under the shield of law and in the name of justice."
-Charles de Montesquieu

"Where the law ends tyranny begins."

-Henry Fielding

"All that is necessary for evil to triumph, is for good men to do nothing."

-Edmund Burke

"We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office."

-Aesop

"Make men large and strong and tyranny will bankrupt itself in making shackles for them."

-Henry Ward Beecher

"Erecting the 'wall of separation between church and state'...is absolutely essential in a free society."

-Thomas Jefferson

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"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross."

-Sinclair Lewis

"A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Sub- jects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they con- sider god-fearing and pious."

-Aristotle

"Tyrants have always some slight shade of virtue; they support the laws before destroying them."

-Voltaire

"So long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote them- selves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men."

-Voltairine de Cleyre

"No tyrant need fear till men begin to feel confident in each other."

-Aristotle

"The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppose."

-Frederick Douglass

"You may talk of the tyranny of Nero and Tiberius; but the real tyranny is the tyranny of your next-door neighbor."

-Walter Bagehot

"The one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the party that succeeds, by force or fraud, in carrying elections."

-Lord Acton

"The Framers [of the Constitution] knew that free speech is the friend of change and revolution. But they also knew that it is always the deadliest enemy of tyranny."

-Hugo Black

"There is no week nor day nor hour when tyranny may not enter upon this country, if the people lose their roughness and spirit of defiance."

-Walt Whitman

"Preventive war was an invention of Hitler. Frankly, I would not even listen to anyone seriously that came and talked about such a thing."

-Dwight D. Eisenhower

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"So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, the Caesars and Napoleons will arise to make them miserable."

-Aldous Huxley

"Keep the church and state forever separate."

-Ulysses S. Grant

"When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty...then he is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader."

-Plato

"A state is not a state if it belongs to one man."

-Sophocles

"Whilst we assert for ourselves a freedom to embrace, to profess and to observe the religion which we believe to be of divine origin, we cannot deny an equal freedom to those whose minds have not yet yielded to the evidence which has convinced us."

-James Madison

"Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."

-Benjamin Franklin

"Kings will be tyrants from policy, when subjects are rebels from principle."

-Edmund Burke

"When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty."

-Thomas Jefferson

"Tyranny and anarchy are never far apart."

-Jeremy Bentham

"Who does not see that the same authority which can establish Christianity, in exclusion of all other religions, may establish with the same ease any particular sect of Christians, in exclusion of all other sects?"

-James Madison

"The secret of freedom lies in educating people, whereas the secret of tyranny is in keeping them ignorant."

-Maximilien Robespierre

"Secrecy is the keystone of all tyranny."

-Robert A. Heinlein

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"Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves, for the rights of all who are destitute. Speak up and judge fairly; defend the rights of the poor and needy." - Proverbs 31:8-9