C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Tyranny
Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.
Be sure there are domestic tyrants also.
Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny.
A wicked tyrant is better than a wicked war.
Love reigns a very tyrant in my heart.
Hardness ever of hardness is mother.
’Tis time to fear, when tyrants seem to kiss.
A man’s tyranny is measured only by his power to abuse.
Clever tyrants are never punished.
Is there no tyrant but the crowned one?
What is more cruel than a tyrant’s ear?
There is a remedy in human nature against tyranny, that will keep us safe under every form of government.
A company of tyrants in inaccessible to all seductions.
The sovereign is called a tyrant who knows no laws but his caprice.
Still when the lust of tyrant power succeeds, some Athens perishes, or some Tully bleeds.
The tyrant, it has been said, is but a slave turned inside out.
None but tyrants have any business to be afraid.
He who strikes terror into others is himself in continual fear.
Where the hand of tyranny is long we do not see the lips of men open with laughter.
Tyrants have not yet discovered any chains that can fetter the mind.
Of all the tyrants that the world affords, our own affections are the fiercest lords.
Oppressive government is more cruel than a tiger.
Whoever is right, the persecutor must be wrong.
The most insupportable of tyrants exclaim against the exercise of arbitrary power.
Kings will be tyrants from policy, when subjects are rebels from principle.
There is no tyranny so despotic as that of public opinion among a free people.
Arbitrary power is most easily established on the ruins of liberty abused to licentiousness.
A king rules as he ought, a tyrant as he lists; a king to the profit of all, a tyrant only to please a few.
It is not the rigor, but the inexpediency, of laws and acts of authority, which makes them tyrannical.
Unlimited power corrupts the possessor; and this I know, that, where law ends, there tyranny begins.
When the will of man is raised above law it is always tyranny and despotism, whether it is the will of a bashaw or of bastard patriots.
Tyrants commonly cut off the stairs by which they climb up unto their thrones***for fear that, if they still be left standing, others will get up the same way.
O nation miserable, with an untitled tyrant bloody-sceptered, when shalt thou see thy wholesome days again?
He that by harshness of nature rules his family with an iron hand is as truly a tyrant as he who misgoverns a nation.
A great deal of the furniture of ancient tyranny is torn to rags; the rest is entirely out of fashion.
An extreme rigor is sure to arm everything against it, and at length to relax into a supine neglect.
The most imperious masters over their own servants are at the same time the most abject slaves to the servants of others.
Every wanton and causeless restraint of the will of the subject, whether practiced by a monarch, a nobility, or a popular assembly, is a degree of tyranny.
There is nothing more hostile to a city than a tyrant, under whom in the first and chiefest place, there are not laws in common, but one man, keeping the law himself to himself, has the sway, and this is no longer equal.
The lust of dominion innovates so imperceptibly that we become complete despots before our wanton abuse of power is perceived; the tyranny first exercised in the nursery is exhibited in various shapes and degrees in every stage of our existence.
It is the nature of tyranny and rapacity never to learn moderation from the ill-success of first oppressions; on the contrary, all oppressors, all men thinking highly of the methods dictated by their nature, attribute the frustration of their desires to the want of sufficient rigor.