Top 20 Despot Quotes

Words matter. These are the best Despot Quotes from famous people such as Demosthenes, Marquis de Lafayette, Frank Herbert, Aeschylus, Richard Jefferies, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.

Close alliances with despots are never safe for free st

Close alliances with despots are never safe for free states.
Demosthenes
The Huron and Iroquois forests are peopled by my friends; with me, the despots of Europe and their courts are the savages.
Marquis de Lafayette
If you think of yourselves as helpless and ineffectual, it is certain that you will create a despotic government to be your master. The wise despot, therefore, maintains among his subjects a popular sense that they are helpless and ineffectual.
Frank Herbert
Neither a life of anarchy nor one beneath a despot should you praise; to all that lies in the middle a god has given excellence.
Aeschylus
No tyrant, however evil, has yet lacked ready hands to execute his most abominable will. To read how eagerly men have rushed to serve the despot is the bitterest, the saddest matter of history; it is the saddest sight in our own day.
Richard Jefferies
Bush II’s democracy crusade and Obama’s embrace of the Arab Spring have unleashed and empowered forces less receptive to America’s wishes and will than the despots and dictators deposed with our approval.
Pat Buchanan
Your generous part in my liberation is taken by the world for the revelation of the fact, that the United States are resolved not to allow the despots of the world to trample on oppressed humanity.
Lajos Kossuth
The court today, just as in 1776, is deaf to the voices of the people and their repeated entreaties: they have become arrogant, contemptuous, highhanded, and literal despots.
George Wallace
Enlightened despots are mythical creatures; real despots seem more interested in stealing money or installing their sons after them.
Elliott Abrams
The savior who wants to turn men into angels is as much a hater of human nature as the totalitarian despot who wants to turn them into puppets.
Eric Hoffer
Our nation and those of the developed world must offer our own resistance to despot leaders who seek to commit murder on the basis of religion or race.
Tim Bishop
Last chances in the Middle East have been two a dirham since the 1950s. Each year the enmities are more profound, the despots more bloodthirsty and clownish, the violence more extreme, and the conditions of ordinary existence more ghastly.
James Buchan
Be assured, fellow citizens, that in a democracy it is the laws that guard the person of the citizen and the constitution of the state, whereas the despot and the oligarch find their protection in suspicion and in armed guards.
Aeschines
Never may a man prone to believe scandal be a despot or a popular leader! Under his guidance, democracy itself will be despotism.
Apollonius of Tyana
Mugabe’s become a disgrace to Africa. And I must say this because I am an African and a lot of us looked up to him back in the 1980s when he was the liberation hero. But he’s now turned himself into a murderous despot.
George Ayittey
There is one safeguard known generally to the wise, which is an advantage and security to all, but especially to democracies as against despots – suspicion.
Demosthenes
Idealism is the despot of thought, just as politics is the despot of will.
Mikhail Bakunin
Freedom is contagious. That’s why despots fear it so much.
Bill Owens
The single despot stands out in the face of all men, and says: I am the State: My will is law: I am your master: I take the responsibility of my acts: The only arbiter I acknowledge is the sword: If any one denies my right, let him try conclusions with me.
Lysander Spooner
We always make the mistake in the United States of America in Democratic or Republican administrations alike is we tend to embrace the despot that’s least troublesome to us. That should not be the way we view things.
Anthony Weiner