"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
- C. S. Lewis
"Every collectivist revolution rides in on a Trojan horse of "emergency". It was the tactic of Lenin, Hitler, and Mussolini. In the collectivist sweep over a dozen minor countries of Europe, it was the cry of men striving to get on horseback. And "emergency" became the justification of the subsequent steps. This technique of creating emergency is the greatest achievement that demagoguery attains." — Herbert Hoover.
"So long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men."
— Voltarine de Cleyre
“Tyrants have always some slight shade of virtue; they support the laws before destroying them” -Voltaire
“This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector.”
-Plato 428 BC-348 BC
"When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty."
-Thomas Jefferson
"Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny."
-Thomas Jefferson
“Law premised on equality will simply assert the tyrannical supremacy of an elite group of men. True Law must rest on the absolute and only true God.”
-R.J. Rushdoony from The Institutes of Biblical Law
"The alternative to God’s law is not no law at all, but human law; governments which do not guard the majesty of God and His righteous law have no alternative and choice but to uphold the majesty of their own human authority ... If no higher law is adhered to, then the law of man is absolute; there is no logical barrier to stop such a state from becoming totalitarian. When the state’s will is substituted for God’s will, then the only real crimes become crimes against the state (as in Imperial Rome, present day Russia, and much of the United States), for example, treason, defection, and so forth ... There is no appeal beyond the state and its rulers when God’s law is put aside; man has no realm of justice to which he has recourse in opposing the will of the state ... For Christians the choice is between a law order based on God or the potentially tyrannical oppression of a law order resting in the arbitrary will and power of the secular state."
- Greg Bahnsen, Theonomy in Christian Ethics
