Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism.
Mary McCarthy

Democracy passes into despotism.
Plato

Despotism can only exist in darkness, and there are too many lights now in the political firmament to permit it to remain anywhere, as it has heretofore done, almost everywhere.
James Madison

Despotism increases in severity with the number of despots; the responsibility is more divided, and the claims are more numerous.
William Wells Brown

Despotism is a long crime.
Victor Hugo

Despotism is the only form of government which may with safety to itself, neglect the education of its infant poor.
Samuel Horsley

Each man has an equal social right to multiply his power of motion by all the social factors of civilization. Private property in any of these factors is inconsistent with this fundamental right; it must, obviously, prove a source of economic despotism and industrial slavery.
Daniel De Leon

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.
Barry Goldwater

Force is the vital principle and immediate parent of despotism.
Thomas Jefferson

Freedom of conscience entails more dangers than authority and despotism.
Michel Foucault

Have any of our friends got off the Island with their families, or what must they submit to? Despotism or destruction, I fear, is their fate.
William Floyd

Man is insatiable for power; he is infantile in his desires and, always discontented with what he has, loves only what he has not. People complain of the despotism of princes; they ought to complain of the despotism of man.
Joseph de Maistre

Our defense is in the preservation of the spirit which prizes liberty as a heritage of all men, in all lands, everywhere. Destroy this spirit and you have planted the seeds of despotism around your own doors.
Abraham Lincoln

Religions are the cradles of despotism.
Marquis de Sade

Small natures require despotism to exercise their sinews, as great souls thirst for equality to give play to their heart.
Honore de Balzac

So long as war is the main business of nations, temporary despotism - despotism during the campaign - is indispensable.
Walter Bagehot

The chains of military despotism, once fastened upon a nation, ages might pass away before they could be shaken off.
William Henry Harrison

The despotism of custom is everywhere the standing hindrance to human advancement.
John Stuart Mill

The doctrine of blind obedience and unqualified submission to any human power, whether civil or ecclesiastical, is the doctrine of despotism, and ought to have no place among Republicans and Christians.
Angelina Grimke

The more complete the despotism, the more smoothly all things move on the surface.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton