tyranny quotes

The function of music isto release us from the tyranny of conscious thought.

- SirThomas Beecham
Quoted in Harold  Atkins and  Archie Newman Beecham Stories (1978).

TheTyranny of Distance.

- Geoffrey Norman Blainey
  Title of book. English barrister. She is married to Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Bemercifuluntome,OGod, be mercifuluntome, for my soul trusteth in thee: and under the shadow of thy wings shall be my refuge, until this tyranny be over-past.

-Book of Common Prayer
Psalm 57:1.

Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny.

- Edmund Burke
  Speech, Bristol.

Tyranny sets up its own echo-chamber.

- Bruce Chatwin
  Utz.

Of all tyrannies in history, the Bolshevik tyranny is the worst, the most destructive, the most degrading. Every British and French soldier killed last year was really done to death by Lenin and Trotskynot in fair war, but by the treacherous desertion of an ally without parallel in the history of the world.

- Lord Randolph Henry Spencer Churchill
  Speech, London,11  Apr.

Slow tyranny of moonlight, moonlight loved And changed.

- (Harold) Hart Crane
  White Buildings,'Voyages', pt.5.

They that are discontented under monarchy call it tyranny; and they that are displeased with aristocracy call it oligarchy; so also, they which find themselves grieved under a democracy call it anarchy, which signifies the want of government; and yet I think no man believes that want of government is any new kind of government.

-Thomas Hobbes
Leviathan, pt.2, ch.19.

   Then let us have our libertyagain, And challenge to yourselves no sovereignty. You came not in the world without our pain, Make that a bar against your cruelty; Your fault being greater, why should you disdain Our being your equals, free from tyranny?

- Aemilia Lanyer
Salve Deus Ex Judaeorum,'Eve's  Apology in Defense of Women'.

A modern democracy is a tyranny whose borders are undefined; one discovers how far one can go only by traveling in a straight line until one is stopped.

- Norman Kingsley Mailer
  The Presidential Papers, preface.

It is the American vice, the democratic disease which expresses its tyranny by reducing everything unique to the level of the herd.

- Henry Valentine Miller
  On democracy. The Wisdom of the Heart,'Raimu'.

He mobilized the English language and sent it into battle to steady his fellow countrymen and hearten those Europeans upon whom the long dark night of tyranny had descended.

- Edward (Edgar) R(oscoe) Murrow
  Of Churchill. Broadcast, 30 Nov, quoted in In Search of Light (1967).

Taxation without representation is tyranny.

-James Otis
c.1761  His defence, which became a rallying call of the American Revolution.

Where laws end, tyranny begins.

-William, 1st Earl of Chatham known as  the Elder Pitt
  Speech to the House of Lords, 2 Mar.

Amid the wreck and the misery of nations it is our just exaltation that we have continued superior to all that ambition or despotism could effect; and our still higher exaltation ought to be that we provide not only for our own safety but hold out a prospect for nations now bending under the yoke of tyranny of what the exertions of a free people can effect.

-William known as  theYounger Pitt
  Speech to the House of Commons, 25 Apr.

We are fighting in the quarrel of civilization against barbarism, of liberty against tyranny.Germany has become a menace to the whole world. She is the most dangerous enemy of liberty now existing.

-Theodore Roosevelt
  Speech at Oyster Bay, Long Island, Apr.

   Revolutions have never lightened the burden of tyranny: they have only shifted it to another shoulder.

- George Bernard Shaw
  Man and Superman,'The Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion, byJohnTanner', foreword.

Weird heroes and mould-breaking champions exist as living proof to those who need it that the tyranny of 'the rat race' is not yet final.

- Hunter S(tockton) Thompson
  'Those DaringYoung Men InTheir Flying Machines†Ain't WhatThey UsedTo Be!', in Pageant, Sep.

I have struggled against tyranny. I didn't do that in order to substitute one tyranny with another.

- Desmond Mpilo Tutu
  In The IrishTimes,'ThisWeekThey Said', 31 Oct.