Everybody would be a dictator if he could.

It was one of the greatest errors in evaluating dictatorship to say that the dictator forces himself on society against its own will. In reality, every dictator in history was nothing but the accentuation of already existing state ideas which he had only to exaggerate in order to gain power

To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?Cicero, Orator, 46 BCBy way of 'Dictator' by Robert Harris, 2015

This light of history is pitiless; it has a strange and divine quality that, luminous as it is, and precisely because it is luminous, often casts a shadow just where we saw a radiance; out of the same man it makes two different phantoms, and the one attacks and punishes the other, the darkness of the despot struggles with the splendor of the captain. Hence a truer measure in the final judgment of the nations. Babylon violated diminishes Alexander; Rome enslaved diminishes Caesar; massacred Jerusalem diminishes Titus. Tyranny follows the tyrant. Woe to the man who leaves behind a shadow that bears his form.

As centuries of dictators have known, an illiterate crowd is the easiest to rule; since the craft of reading cannot be untaught once it has been acquired, the second-best recourse is to limit its scope.

Kadafi is a zombie in a pillbox hat, that's what he is!

Is is true that dictators never dream because they can change their smallest fantasies into realities if they want to?

Time and time again does the pride of man influence his very own fall. While denying it, one gradually starts to believe that he is the authority, or that he possesses great moral dominion over others, yet it is spiritually unwarranted. By that point he loses steam; in result, he falsely begins trying to prove that unwarranted dominion by seizing the role of a condemner.

The ultimate story of success: When a nobody, who has never once in his entire life known the feeling of being remembered or respected, suddenly snaps and becomes a world dictator. On one hand it sounds just, but on the other, it illustrates the reason why a prosperity message has and needs its limitations.

Dictators ride to and fro upon tigers which they dare not dismount. And the tigers are getting hungry.

I'm not a dictator. It's just that I have a grumpy face.

There is an interesting resemblance in the speeches of dictators, no matter what country they may hail from or what language they may speak.

A man may build himself a throne of bayonets, but he cannot sit on it.

The essence of modern dictatorship is the combination of one-dimensional, flat thinking with power and terror.

Hitler is no worse, nay better, in my opinion, than the other lugs. He makes the German mistake of being tactless, that's all.

If I were a dictator I should make it compulsory for every member of the population between the ages of four and eighty to listen to Mozart for at least a quarter of an hour daily for the coming five years.

Dictators have only become possible through the invention of the microphone.

A dictator must fool all the people all the time and there's only one way to do that, he must also fool himself.

Genghis Khan wasn't very loveable but he was bloody efficient.

A dictatorship is a country where they have taken the politics out of politics.