“Let nobody doubt that religions are the cradles of despotism. The first of all despots was a priest; the first king and the first emperor of Rome, Numa and Augustus, both allied themselves with the priesthood; Constantine and Clovis were abbots rather than sovereigns; Heliopolis was the priest of the sun. In all times, in all centuries, despotism and religion have been so thoroughly interconnected that, as is easily demonstrated, in destroying one you undermine the other, for the profound reason that each will help the other to gain power.”

The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1891)

Chomsky on Religion (2010) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNDG7ErY-k4&amp;feature=related. <br class="br">Quotes 2010s, 2010

Suppliants (tr. Edward P. Coleridge)

Acceptance Speech http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/daily/may98/goldwaterspeech.htm as the Republican Presidential candidate, San Francisco (July 1964)<br>Unsourced variant: Now those who seek absolute power, even though they seek it to do what they regard as good, are simply demanding the right to enforce their own version of heaven on earth, and let me remind you they are the very ones who always create the most hellish tyranny. <br class="br">Context: Those who seek absolute power, even though they seek it to do what they regard as good, are simply demanding the right to enforce their own version of heaven on earth. And let me remind you, they are the very ones who always create the most hellish tyrannies. Absolute power does corrupt, and those who seek it must be suspect and must be opposed. Their mistaken course stems from false notions of equality, ladies and gentlemen. Equality, rightly understood, as our founding fathers understood it, leads to liberty and to the emancipation of creative differences. Wrongly understood, as it has been so tragically in our time, it leads first to conformity and then to despotism.

Source: Endless Knight

Citoyens, il est à craindre que la révolution, comme Saturne, ne dévore successivement tous ses enfants et n’engendre enfin le despotisme avec les calamités qui l’accompagnent.
Quoted by F.A.M. Mignet, Histoire de la révolution française (1824), ch. 7 http://perso.orange.fr/fdomi.fournier/H%20moderne/Mignet/P_04.htm original French] and [http://www.fullbooks.com/History-of-the-French-Revolution-from-17894.html English translation

Source: Politics: A Very Short Introduction, Chapter 1

Part 2.2 Introduction
1790s, Rights of Man, Part 2 (1792)

Address https://apnews.com/article/e5458697cf06bbb518a9ffafffd650e5 to the U.N. Security Council (31 January 1992) <br class="br">1990s