Despots play their part in the works of thinkers. Fettered words are terrible words. The writer doubles and trebles the power of his writing when a ruler imposes silence on the people. Something emerges from that enforced silence, a mysterious fullness which filters through and becomes steely in the thought. Repression in history leads to conciseness in the historian, and the rocklike hardness of much celebrated prose is due to the tempering of the tyrant.
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Babylon violated diminishes Alexander; Rome enslaved diminishes Caesar; massacred Jerusalem diminishes Titus. Tyranny follows the tyrant. Woe to the man who leaves behind a shadow that bears his form.
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A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider god-fearing and pious. On the other hand, they do less easily move against him, believing that he has the gods on his side.
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The only tyrant I accept in this world is the 'still small voice' within me.
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Both oligarch and tyrant mistrust the people, and therefore deprive them of their arms.
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A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider god-fearing and pious. On the other hand, they do less easily move against him, believing that he has
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The people always have some champion whom they set over them and nurse into greatness. This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector.
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The fanatic is incorruptible: if he kills for an idea, he can just as well get himself killed for one; in either case, tyrant or martyr, he is a monster.
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The East Wind, an interloper in the dominions of Westerly Weather, is an impassive-faced tyrant with a sharp poniard held behind his back for a treacherous stab.
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In a republic, that paradise of debility, the politician is a petty tyrant who obeys the laws.
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Any excuse will serve a tyrant.
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If we must have a tyrant, let him at least be a gentleman who has been bred to the business, and let us fall by the axe and not by the butcher's cleaver.
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Every successful revolution puts on in time the robes of the tyrant it has deposed.
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A woman who gives any advantage to a man may expect a lover -- but will sooner or later find a tyrant.
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The people have always some champion whom they set over them and nurse into greatness...This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs when he first appears he is a protector.
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A truer image of the world, I think, is obtained by picturing things as entering into the stream of time from an eternal world outside, than from a view which regards time as the devouring tyrant of all that is.
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When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty, and there is nothing more to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader.
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Fashion is a tyrant from which there is no deliverance; all must conform to its whimsical.
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The only tyrant I accept in this world is the still voice within.
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The people have always some champion whom they set over them and nurse into greatness...This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector.
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And then, the negro being doomed, and damned, and forgotten, to everlasting bondage, is the white man quite certain that the tyrant demon will...
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The tyrant dies and his rule is over, the martyr dies and his rule begins.
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When people have no other tyrant, their own public opinion becomes one.
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O tyrant love, to what do you not drive the hearts of men.
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The sovereign is called a tyrant who knows no laws but his caprice.
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A woman who gives any advantage to a man may expect a lover - but will sooner or later find a tyrant.
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The strong are strongest alone.
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Old age is a tyrant, who forbids, under pain of death, the pleasures of youth.
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Cruelty is a tyrant that's always attended with fear.
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A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant, at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient bureaucracy.
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