Quotes about Tyrants

Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one's thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants. It is the right which they first of all strike down.

When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they can seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall. Think of it--always.

Remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers and for a time they seem invincible but in the end, they always fall -- think of it, ALWAYS.

And, since the exile was the result of Israel's idolatry (no devout Jew would have contested the point, since the great prophets had made it so clear), what they needed was not just a new Passover, a new rescue from slavery to pagan tyrants. They needed forgiveness.

Who, after all, was it who didn't want the dead to be raised? Not simply the intellectually timid or the rationalists. It was, and is, those in power, the social and intellectual tyrants and bullies; the Caesars who would be threatened by a Lord of the world who had defeated the tyrant's last weapon, death itself; the Herods who would be horrified at the postmortem validation of the true King of the Jews.18

This understanding [of the image of God] turns our supremacism upsidedown, for if we resemble God in that we have dominion, we must be called to be "imitators of God" (Eph. 5:1) in the way we exercise it. Indeed, far from giving us a free hand on the earth, the imago Dei constrains us. We must be kings, not tyrants — if we become the latter we deny, and even destroy, the image in us. Huw Spanner

Progressive thievery is thievery of a special sort, thievery that marches behind the banner of justice. In one of his other books, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche writes that for the avengers, justice is a camouflage for envy and revenge; these are "tyrants who shroud themselves in words of virtue.

For indeed none can love freedom heartily, but good men: the rest love not freedom, but license: which never hath more scope, or more indulgence than under tyrants.

We should eliminate sin if we wish to eliminate the scourge of tyrants.

People who cannot restrain their own baser instincts, who cannot treat one another with civility, are not capable of self-government... without virtue, a society can be ruled only by fear, a truth that tyrants understand all too well

My actions are ruled by appetite, passion, prejudice, greed, love, fear, environment, habit, and the worst of these tyrants is habit. Therefore, if I must be a slave to habit let me be a slave to good habits. My bad habits must be destroyed and new furrows prepared for good seed.

Conversion is a change of masters. Will we not do as much for our new master, the Lord Jesus, as we did once for our old tyrant lusts?