[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.
When will Labour learn that you cannot build Jerusalem in Brussels.
Populists and isolationists ignore the tangible benefits that have resulted from our active international role during the past half-century.
With the people, for the people, by the people. I crack up when I hear it; I say, with the handful, for the handful, by the handful, cause that's what really happens.
There is no right government except good government.
I have always been of opinion that all the political workers should be indifferent and should never bother about the legal fight in the law courts and should boldly bear the heaviest possible sentences inflicted upon them. They may defend themselves but always from purely political considerations and never from a personal point of view.
So many idealistic political movements for a better world have ended in mass-murdering dictatorships. Giving leaders enough power to create 'social justice' is giving them enough power to destroy all justice, all freedom, and all human dignity.
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