Top 135 Dictatorship Quotes

I grew up in Cuba under a strong, military, oppressive dictatorship. So as a teenager, I found myself involved in a revolution. I remember during that time, a young, charismatic leader rose up, talking about hope and change. His name was Fidel Castro.

I seek to lead a democratic Pakistan which is free from the yoke of military dictatorship and that will cease to be a haven, the very petri dish of international terrorism.

I should like to underline: no people, no country, in which a Communist dictatorship has been established, ever found its way out of it.

I believe in benevolent dictatorship provided I am the dictator.

I cannot think of a tactical alliance with the Left because I represent the idea that there is a peaceful, nonviolent way to dislodge a dictatorship… A tactical Left alliance damages my argument. If I succeed with them, we will never know if peace can really produce freedom.

Fascism is not the result of dictatorship.

If Greece had gone through a very normal political life, I may have not been in politics. But just the fact that I lived through huge upheavals and very difficult struggles and polarization and the barbarism of dictatorships – that made me feel that we had to change this country.

For a writer, personal freedom is not so important. It is not individual freedom that guarantees the greatness of literature; otherwise, writers in democratic countries would be superior to all others. Some of the greatest writers wrote under dictatorship – Shakespeare, Cervantes.

It is remarkable how easily children and grown-ups adapt to living in a dictatorship organised by lunatics.

Television has made dictatorship impossible but democracy unbearable.

I’m a product of a military dictatorship. Under a dictatorship, you cannot trust information or dispense it freely because of censorship. So Brazilians become very flexible in the use of metaphors. They learn to communicate with double meanings.

I am the product of living in dictatorships. And someone who’s lived in dictatorships and not being allowed to be themselves, it cherishes the ability to be yourself and to have feelings and to speak them when asked. And I am that person.

I think the only positive thing that came from Uruguay’s dictatorship was the spread of Montevideo natives around the world, and I continued writing about them from my various places of exile.

The truth is, it’s a totalitarian dictatorship when you’re making films. You are the boss. You can listen to other people, and it can be a benevolent dictatorship, but it’s a dictatorship nonetheless. A lot of directors go past their first experience, that’s what they’ve come away with.

Under a dictatorship, a nation ceases to exist. All that remains is a fiefdom, a planet of slaves regimented by aliens from outer space.

The accords were fig leaves of democratic procedure to hide the nakedness of Stalinist dictatorship.

Under a dictatorship, a nation ceases to exist. All that remains is a fiefdom, a planet of slaves regimented by aliens from outer space.

In Pakistan, there have been two real powers – one is Bhuttoism, and one is the worshipers of dictatorship. I call them the supporters of the establishment.

Nigerian politics has been, since the military dictatorships, largely non-ideological. Rather than a battle of ideas, it is about who can pump in the most money and buy the most access.

We’ve seen in the past, Justin Trudeau professing his admiration for the basic dictatorship of China.

When there is oppression and dictatorship, by not speaking out, we lose our dignity.

Music should never be a dictatorship. It should be a symbiotic relationship between the musician and the audience.

To Westerners, the students at Tiananmen may have given an impression of a solid and energetic consensus against dictatorship and for democracy, but they were an egotistical and fractious lot, riven by disagreements over tactics and money.

The world will not accept dictatorship or domination.

No dictatorship can be sustained within the context of an information revolution.

The reason there’s not a dictatorship in Chile and that there’s a democracy in South Africa and Portugal today – and that Haiti has a nascent democracy – is that the world community as a whole felt outraged. This is the reason Milosevic sits in a jail in The Hague. It’s because the world has said, ‘Enough.’

We have to implant democracies where there are now dictatorships.

I have often thought that if a rational Fascist dictatorship were to exist, then it would choose the American system.

There are examples of fraternal dictatorships, or one, anyway: the passing of power from Fidel to Raul Castro.

No dictatorship can be sustained within the context of an information revolution.

I’ve heard directing talked about as being a benign dictatorship, and I think that’s probably the best way a director should be. They’re open to collaboration and feedback from people, but ultimately, it’s got to be that one person’s vision. That’s what I think makes a film really stand out.

The transition from dictatorship to democracy is always very difficult, and if you read a history of any country that went through this, it wasn’t easy. And, you know, you don’t end dictatorship one day and next day you have fully fledged democracy.

Anywhere, anytime ordinary people are given the chance to choose, the choice is the same: freedom, not tyranny; democracy, not dictatorship; the rule of law, not the rule of the secret police.

My personal influence in the Revolutionary Governing Council is such that the dictatorship of the proletariat is firmly established, since the masses are backing me.

When you have an efficient government, you have a dictatorship.

I have established the republic. But today it is not clear whether the form of government is a republic, a dictatorship, or personal rule.

I worry about a democracy having nuclear weapons as much as a dictatorship having nuclear weapons.

Pope John Paul II not only visited Nigeria twice but stood by the country in its fight against dictatorship and injustice.

When there is oppression and dictatorship, by not speaking out, we lose our dignity.

Oil could complicate domestic politics in countries with too much of it – there is a reason economists talk about ‘the curse of oil,’ and dictatorships have thrived in countries with abundant natural resources.

To us, anyone who opposes dictatorship is our friend. Those who support it, our enemy.

A dictatorship would be a heck of a lot easier, there’s no question about it.

I grew up under a dictatorship. I knew what it meant for people to not have the ability to freely express themselves.

The one indisputable reality of dictatorship is that dissent, insult, and malevolent language do not go unpunished if it is allowed at all.

When liberty becomes license, dictatorship is near.

When you have an efficient government, you have a dictatorship.

Military dictatorship, you can focus on it, you can fight it directly. It’s a band of power-driven people.

It’s very hard to describe an elected government as a dictatorship.

The United States isn’t a dictatorship ruling with a brutal army and an iron fist, so our police departments must understand that they are there to serve and protect us – all of us. And when they do commit crimes, they must be arrested and prosecuted like anyone else, bottom line.

We all accept the world would be safer without Saddam’s baleful dictatorship.

Look, I don’t think President Obama would have bowed to the ruler of Saudi Arabia if he didn’t have oil to the degree that the Saudis do. I think they and other producing states, almost all of whom, except Norway and Canada, are dictatorships or autocratic systems, have thrown their weight around because of oil.

I sing against emotional dictatorships, and against the imposition of one person over another, in the name of love.

Reading ‘Animal Farm’ set me free from the dictatorship in my head. I could see all the tactics used by the regime to control us – they were all in that book.

I even believed in a third way; I thought it was possible to put a human face on capitalism. But I was wrong. The only way to save the world is through socialism, but a socialism that exists within a democracy; there’s no dictatorship here.

‘1984,’ one of the most important works ever written, helped us understand the Cold War. In ‘1984,’ the dictatorship was always surveilling you. Now, young people want to be surveyed. They want people to know where they are at all times.

It’s very hard to describe an elected government as a dictatorship.

The accords were fig leaves of democratic procedure to hide the nakedness of Stalinist dictatorship.

I grew up in Taiwan, which was a military dictatorship.

It is vital to speak up in a democracy. Otherwise we are living in dictatorships.

Red is a benevolent dictatorship.

I could never be a control freak. If Wu-Tang is a dictatorship, how does every Wu-Tang member have their own contract, their own career, and have put out more albums without me than they’ve done with me?

What you had at the time was a dictatorship with the team owners.

We have gone through everything as a nation – partition, dictatorship, and even anarchy.

The first time I played was in Buenos Aires – was in 1983. The dictatorship was in position.

Extremism can flourish only in an environment where basic governmental social responsibility for the welfare of the people is neglected. Political dictatorship and social hopelessness create the desperation that fuels religious extremism.

True individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.

I first went to Indonesia in 2001 for six months. I was to help a community of plantation workers to make a film documenting and dramatizing the struggle to organize a union in the aftermath of the Suharto dictatorship.

The world has to have zero tolerance for naked dictatorship.

I was unlucky enough to grow up under a military dictatorship which had very Left-wing, socialist policies. It’s not something I would wish on anyone.

We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one’s own ego and one’s own desires.

Anywhere, anytime ordinary people are given the chance to choose, the choice is the same: freedom, not tyranny; democracy, not dictatorship; the rule of law, not the rule of the secret police.

Beginning with adolescence, my political formation was oriented in the ideological direction of Marxism. It was natural, being that my thinking was influenced by an atmosphere of active critical resistance. That was the way it was during all of the dictatorship and up to the Revolution of 1974.

The patchwork political landscape of the Arab world – the client monarchies, degenerated nationalist dictatorships, and the imperial petrol stations known as the Gulf states – was the outcome of an intensive experience of Anglo-French colonialism.

I grew up in Taiwan, which was a military dictatorship.

No one argues that we should have imposed a dictatorship in Afghanistan having liberated the country. Similarly, we weren’t about to impose a dictatorship in Iraq having liberated the country.

It serves notice that President Bush is serious about promoting freedom, because free societies are a lot more peaceable than dictatorships and monarchies.

I am in favour of a dictatorship.

Spain’s constitution was introduced to cement democracy after Franco’s dictatorship, but this government is exploiting its wording as a means to deny us our right to vote.

Literature has its own life, even in a dictatorship like the Soviet Union.

The worship of the golden calf of old has found a new and heartless image in the cult of money and the dictatorship of an economy which is faceless and lacking any truly human goal.

It’s true that General Musharraf opposes my return, seeing me as a symbol of democracy in the country. He is comfortable with dictatorship. I hope better sense prevails.

We benefit, intellectually and personally, from the interplay between different selves, from the balance between long-term contemplation and short-term impulse. We should be wary about tipping the scales too far. The community of selves shouldn’t be a democracy, but it shouldn’t be a dictatorship, either.

On ‘Sound of My Voice,’ I was the first and last word, which is kind of a dictatorship. I like collectives, though.

Literature has its own life, even in a dictatorship like the Soviet Union.

Extremism can flourish only in an environment where basic governmental social responsibility for the welfare of the people is neglected. Political dictatorship and social hopelessness create the desperation that fuels religious extremism.

Dictatorships start wars because they need external enemies to exert internal control over their own people.

I lived in a dictatorship in Brazil, and I was arrested three times. I felt in my flesh what it is to live under such a regime and experience deprivation of freedom.

There is a disturbing reincarnation of socialist and nationalist dictatorships raising their heads around the world and even in our own back yard. You see it in places like Venezuela and Bolivia, stoked in no small part by Cuba, and also in Central Asia, and troubling trends in Russia and China.

Nigerian politics has been, since the military dictatorships, largely non-ideological. Rather than a battle of ideas, it is about who can pump in the most money and buy the most access.

Military dictatorship is born from the power of the gun, and so it undermines the concept of the rule of law and gives birth to a culture of might, a culture of weapons, violence and intolerance.

Tim Floyd was a guy from college who hadn’t won in the league and he still had that college coaching style of a dictatorship. He didn’t want to listen.

Sometimes I think that a parody of democracy could be more dangerous than a blatant dictatorship, because that gives people an opportunity to avoid doing anything about it.

To compare the United States of America – the beacon of the free world – to the brutal North Korean dictatorship is as insulting as it is asinine.

It is true you cannot eat freedom and you cannot power machinery with democracy. But then neither can political prisoners turn on the light in the cells of a dictatorship.

One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution in order to establish a dictatorship.

You don’t get the fox to be in charge of the chicken coop. You don’t give the outgoing regime – which has been practicing dictatorship, is an authoritarian system, it’s a bunch of military people – the task of changing Egypt into a second republic, a new Egypt with democracy, freedom, rights, etc.

When dictatorship is a fact, revolution becomes a right.

Propaganda is to a democracy what violence is to a dictatorship.

History proves that all dictatorships, all authoritarian forms of government are transient. Only democratic systems are not transient. Whatever the shortcomings, mankind has not devised anything superior.

Libyans are deeply unsettled by Gaddafi and his regime’s careless contempt for human life. The dictatorship is willing to employ any methods necessary to remain in power.

Public opinion in Egypt is very antagonistic to the way the dictatorship, Mubarak dictatorship, interpreted relations with Israel. Very antagonistic.

I have established the republic. But today it is not clear whether the form of government is a republic, a dictatorship, or personal rule.

When liberty becomes license, dictatorship is near.

Only that Swiss in the heart want still a king or at least a strong Upper House of Parliament. Swiss long themselves for less democracy and more dictatorship.

The United States condoned dictatorships in Latin America for much of the 20th century.

But when you have bad governance, of course, these resources are destroyed: The forests are deforested, there is illegal logging, there is soil erosion. I got pulled deeper and deeper and saw how these issues become linked to governance, to corruption, to dictatorship.

If there is no word that means you don’t have the concept. In North Korea they eliminate the words: depression, stress, dictatorship, human rights. You cannot think of those. That’s why all the brainwashing was possible.

One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution in order to establish a dictatorship.

Throughout my entire life, I have lived in the shadow of the dictatorship. It denied me safety and security.

In some states militant nationalism has gone to the lengths of dictatorship, the cult of the absolute or totalitarian state and the glorification of war.

I’ve made the comment that democracies work slower than dictatorships. That’s a true thing.

I was unlucky enough to grow up under a military dictatorship which had very Left-wing, socialist policies. It’s not something I would wish on anyone.

Turkey’s regime is fast degenerating into outright dictatorship, emboldened by the imminent ascent of Donald Trump to the most powerful position on Earth.

It has been claimed at times that our modern age of technology facilitates dictatorship.

To us, anyone who opposes dictatorship is our friend. Those who support it, our enemy.

Unfortunately, writing and reporting the truth is not allowed under Castro’s tyrannical dictatorship.

Dictatorships start wars because they need external enemies to exert internal control over their own people.

The poets who have written the best poems about war seem to be the poets whose countries have experienced an invasion or vicious dictatorships.

No one should suffer from the great delusion that any form of communism or socialism which promotes the dictatorship of the few instead of the initiative of the millions can produce a happier or more prosperous society.

We have this extraordinarily unbalanced constitution, in which we have an elected dictatorship of the prime minister.

Italy in the 1920s, Germany in the ’30s, East Germany in the ’50s, Czechoslovakia in the ’60s, the Latin American dictatorships in the ’70s, China in the ’80s and ’90s – all dictatorships and would-be dictators target newspapers and journalists.

True individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.

Should we continue to spend billions to subsidize foreign military dictatorships, or should we concentrate on taking better care of the one we have right here at home?

Every one of the world’s dictatorships can and does claim to be acting in the name of the people.

Even a polemic has some justification if one considers that my own first poetic experiments began during a dictatorship and mark the origin of the Hermetic movement.

Look at the Paris Commune. That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.

They have been talking about a dictatorship and they were right because there’s a dictatorship and there’s a government that has been fighting that dictatorship, the dictatorship of the media.

Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.

When we overthrew Mubarak, we did this in 18 days. And because we were very naive and very unexperienced in revolutions, we thought that that was it. It is very difficult to imagine that you can actually get rid of a dictatorship that has been there for 60 years only in 18 days. So we were very naive.

I grew up in a dictatorship in a very Catholic country.

An intellectual’s weapon is writing, but sometimes people react as if it were a firearm. A writer can do a lot to change the situation, but as far as I know, no dictatorship has fallen because of a sonnet.

My husband is not American. He was born in Brazil, where he grew up under a filthy, corrupt dictatorship. In his twenties, he moved to Europe, where he lived for a while under various socialist democracies. He spent a few years on a kibbutz in Israel, living out a utopian experiment in communal existence.

Many people – when they think about North Korea and the dictatorship, or the military or nuclear weapons, nuclear missiles, those things – tend to forget ordinary citizens are living there.

Ultimately, the forces of dictatorship and extremism robbed me of my mother, but she lives on as a symbol of hope, a role model for women across the world. She proved beyond a doubt, with her life and relentless courage, that women can certainly do everything.

I never thought about becoming a politician. But during the military dictatorship, my grandfather was put in prison six times and my father twice. If my family and my country didn’t have this history, I might be a professor somewhere today.