[It is a basic principle of a tyrant] to unarm his people of weapons, money and all means whereby they resist his power.
Interpretation
A tyrant seeks to disarm and disempower their people to maintain control and suppress resistance.
Walter Raleigh's quote highlights the fundamental strategy employed by tyrants: to strip away the capacity for self-defense and economic power from their citizens. By disarming their people and eliminating their means of resistance, tyrants ensure their own dominance and prevent any challenge to their authority. This quote serves as a cautionary reminder of the lengths to which oppressive leaders may go to secure their power, reinforcing the importance of maintaining personal freedoms and societal checks on authority.
In practice
During a speech on the importance of civil liberties, one might quote this to emphasize the need for self-defense against oppressive regimes.
Passions are liken'd best to floods and streams:_x000D_ _x000D_ The shallow murmur, but the deep are dumb;_x000D_ _x000D_ So, when affection yields discourse, it seems_x000D_ _x000D_ The bottom is but shallow whence they come._x000D_ _x000D_ They that are rich in words, in words discover
Silence in love betrays more woe - Than words though ne'er so witty; A beggar that is dumb, you know, may challenge double pity.
Even such isTime, which takes in trust Our youth, our joys, and all we have, And pays us but with age and dust, Who in the dark and silent grave When we have wandered all our ways Shuts up the story of our days, And from which earth, and grave, and dust The Lord shall raise me up, I trust.
If she undervalues me, _x000D_ _x000D_ What care I how fair she be?
If all the world and love were young,_x000D_ _x000D_ And truth in every shepherd's tongue,_x000D_ _x000D_ These pretty pleasures might me move_x000D_ _x000D_ To live with thee, and be thy love.
It is the nature of men having escaped one extreme, which by force they were constrained long to endure, to run headlong into the other extreme, forgetting that virtue doth always consist in the mean.
The difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that in a democracy you vote first and take orders later; in a dictatorship you don't have to waste your time voting.
Whensoever the General Government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force.
We must be the great arsenal of Democracy.
It is the height of stupidity to claim that men who for a thousand years have had the power to berate us, to fleece us and to oppress us with impunity, will now agree, with good grace, to be our equals.
In a strange way, I expected Russia to become more like America since the Soviet Union collapsed, but the reverse is true. America has become more like Russia: a kleptocratic society.
It is quite common to hear high officials in Washington and elsewhere speak of changing the map of the Middle East, as if ancient societies and myriad peoples can be shaken up like so many peanuts in a jar.
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