History proves that all dictatorships all authoritarian forms of government are transient. Only democratic systems are not transient. Whatever the shortcomings mankind has not devised anything superior.

We got rid of a terrible dictator. We gave the Iraqi people an opportunity for a new life under a representative form of government.

When you have an efficient government you have a dictatorship.

Jazz is about freedom within discipline. Usually a dictatorship like in Russia and Germany will prevent jazz from being played because it just seemed to represent freedom democracy and the United States.

Every dictator is an enemy of freedom an opponent of law.

It is true you cannot eat freedom and you cannot power machinery with democracy. But then neither can political prisoners turn on the light in the cells of a dictatorship.

When the United States was founded the very idea of a nation premised on democratic principles of freedom and tolerance was viewed by the vast majority of the world as an experiment doomed to fail. Dictatorships monarchies and theocracies had for many centuries ruled the world.

A new breeze is blowing and a world refreshed by freedom seems reborn for in man's heart if not in fact the day of the dictator is over. The totalitarian era is passing its old ideas blown away like leaves from an ancient lifeless tree.

I was interested by the idea that artists working in a totalitarian dictatorship or tsarist autocracy are secretly and slightly shamefully envied by artists who work in freedom. They have the gratification of intense interest: the authorities want to put them in jail while there are younger readers for whom what they write is pure oxygen.

Anywhere anytime ordinary people are given the chance to choose the choice is the same: freedom not tyranny democracy not dictatorship the rule of law not the rule of the secret police.

True individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.

I call on the Iranian people: it is not too late to replace the corrupt regime and return to your glorious Persian heritage a heritage of culture and values and not of bombs and missiles... How can a nation allow a regime to instill fear take away the people's freedom and shock the young generation that seeks its way out of the dictatorial Iran.

Dictators and oppressors should continue to fear me because I will be here for a long time.

On the other hand when I give it closer thought I realize I'm not enough of a dictator to conduct an orchestra because it requires a pretty awful person. When you read these biographies of famous conductors they are all awful people who fail in their private relationships.

The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness.

It has been claimed at times that our modern age of technology facilitates dictatorship.