Speech to the thirtieth anniversary of the Junior Imperial League in Kingsway Hall (19 June 1926), quoted in Our Inheritance (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1938), pp. 17-18.
1926
Context: You have to realize that these years in which we are living, the years into which we are entering, are going to be, as no years before have been, the real testing-time of democracy... We in this country may make a fearful mess of it; and if we make a mess of it, we shall get something much worse— we shall get a tyranny of some kind or other. I don't know what form of tyranny it may be. It may be the communist tyranny; it may be tyranny from the other end. But if you cannot evolve a sound and sane democracy, that will be the fate of the country.
“Tyranny is Tyranny, let it come from whom it may.”
Source: A People's History of the United States
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Howard Zinn 69
author and historian 1922–2010Related quotes
Source: An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789; 1823), Ch. 17 : Of the Limits of the Penal Branch of Jurisprudence
Context: The day has been, I grieve to say in many places it is not yet past, in which the greater part of the species, under the denomination of slaves, have been treated by the law exactly upon the same footing as, in England for example, the inferior races of animals are still. The day may come when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny. The French have already discovered that the blackness of the skin is no reason why a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor. It may one day come to be recognized that the number of legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the os sacrum are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the same fate. What else is it that should trace the insuperable line? Is it the faculty of reason, or perhaps the faculty of discourse? But a full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal, than an infant of a day or a week or even a month, old. But suppose they were otherwise, what would it avail? The question is not Can they reason?, nor Can they talk?, but Can they suffer?
“The tyranny of a multitude is a multiplied tyranny.”
Letter to Thomas Mercer
Undated
“All whom war, dearth, age, agues, tyrannies,
Despair, law, chance, hath slain.”
No. 7, line 6
Holy Sonnets (1633)
Sir Robert Peel
Biographical Studies (1907)
This appears to be a manufactured quote for a PBS documentary on the American Revolution, created by condensing, rewriting, and paraphrasing portions of a lengthy letter James Madison wrote to Thomas Jefferson on 17 October 1788 http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=1937&chapter=118854&layout=html&Itemid=27, about the need for a Bill of Rights and the danger of an establishment of religion. The resulting "quote" profoundly changed the import of what Madison was trying to say and uses modern English. The phrases "biggest danger" and "tyranny of the majority" aren't even in the original letter. The relevant portions of the original letter are (italics in the original; bold added for emphasis):<blockquote>"… In Virginia I have seen the bill of rights violated in every instance where it has been opposed to a popular current. Notwithstanding the explicit provision contained in that instrument for the rights of Conscience, it is well known that a religious establishment would have taken place in that State, if the Legislative majority had found as they expected, a majority of the people in favor of the measure; and I am persuaded that if a majority of the people were now of one sect, the measure would still take place and on narrower ground than was then proposed, notwithstanding the additional obstacle which the law has since created. Wherever the real power in a Government lies, there is the danger of oppression. In our Governments the real power lies in the majority of the Community, and the invasion of private rights is chiefly to be apprehended, not from acts of Government contrary to the sense of its constituents, but from acts in which the Government is the mere instrument of the major number of the Constituents. This is a truth of great importance, but not yet sufficiently attended to; and is probably more strongly impressed on my mind by facts, and reflections suggested by them, than on yours which has contemplated abuses of power issuing from a very different quarter. Wherever there is an interest and power to do wrong, wrong will generally be done, and not less readily by a powerful & interested party than by a powerful and interested prince. …"</blockquote>
Misattributed
“The tyranny of Mrs. Grundy is worse than any other tyranny we suffer under.”
On Manners and Fashion
Essays on Education (1861)
Book 2, chapter 63: Pericles' third speech
History of the Peloponnesian War
“The function of music is to release us from the tyranny of conscious thought.”
Quoted in Atkins and Newman, Beecham Stories, 1978