In such condition (of humanity without government), there is no place for Industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
— Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan or The Matter, Forme and Power of a Common Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil (1651)
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Anime and Manga
"Scum rule the world and give birth to more scum."
— Eustass Kidd, One Piece
Schneizel: Even civilians who have rejected war depend on the police, don't they? Everyone understands that crime cannot be stopped because people can't help the desires they have. That's why we don't need to win hearts or use ideology. Why not bring peace to the world using a system backed by force? In ten days, Damocles will enter the airspace of the United States of China and then switch over to secondary acceleration. After that, we're scheduled to ascend three-hundred kilometers above the surface. From that position, we will hit every warmongering nation with F.L.E.I.J.A.s.
Cornelia: Wait! Shouldn't they be used to defeat Lelouch?! This will devastate the world. You're going to control people through fear?!
Schneizel: Peace is an illusion. Mankind's history is one of war. Is not discipline what is needed to make an illusion reality?
Cornelia: And you plan to teach that lesson to the entire human race?! Only a god can get away with something like that!
Schneizel: Then I shall become a god. If that is what people want me to become to give them peace.
Cornelia: Wait! Shouldn't they be used to defeat Lelouch?! This will devastate the world. You're going to control people through fear?!
Schneizel: Peace is an illusion. Mankind's history is one of war. Is not discipline what is needed to make an illusion reality?
Cornelia: And you plan to teach that lesson to the entire human race?! Only a god can get away with something like that!
Schneizel: Then I shall become a god. If that is what people want me to become to give them peace.
"In spite of their vitality, they are fundamentally stupid creatures who couldn't survive without the nobility to rule them."
—Count Magnus Lee on humanity, Vampire Hunter D
Comic Books
"I'll tell you where I stand. I stand four-square for Justice. I stand for discipline, good order, and the rigid application of the Law — and Grud help any limp-wrist liberals who say different. The people, they know where I stand. They need rules to live by — I provide them. They break the rules, I break them. That's the way it works.
Rights? Sure. I'm all for rights. But not at the expense of order. That's why I like to see that Statue of Judgment standing there, towering over Liberty. Kind of a symbol."
Rights? Sure. I'm all for rights. But not at the expense of order. That's why I like to see that Statue of Judgment standing there, towering over Liberty. Kind of a symbol."
— Judge Dredd, Judge Dredd: America
Film - Live-Action
In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and The Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love; they had 500 years of democracy and peace—and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock!
—Harry Lime, The Third Man note
Reg: All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh-water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?
Xerxes: Brought peace.
Reg: Oh, peace... Shut up!
Xerxes: Brought peace.
Reg: Oh, peace... Shut up!
Romulan ambassador: (optimistically) Twenty years ago, our three governments agreed to develop this planet together.
St. John Talbot: Our new age died a quick death. And the settlers we conned into coming here, they were the dregs of the galaxy. They immediately took to fighting amongst themselves. We forbade them weapons, but they soon began to fashion their own.
St. John Talbot: Our new age died a quick death. And the settlers we conned into coming here, they were the dregs of the galaxy. They immediately took to fighting amongst themselves. We forbade them weapons, but they soon began to fashion their own.
So this is how liberty dies: with thunderous applause.
— Padmé Amidala, Revenge of the Sith, upon the formation of the Galactic Empire.
Bullshit is all the reasons we give for living. And if we can't think up any reasons of our own, we always have the God bullshit. We don't know why we go through all this pointless pain, humiliation, and decay. So there better be someone somewhere who does know. That's the God bullshit. And then there's the noble man bullshit! That man is a noble creature that can order his own world, who needs God? Well, if there's anybody out there that can look around this demented slaughterhouse of a world we live in and tell me that man is a noble creature, believe me: That man is full of bullshit.
— Howard Beale, Network
"I don't want your money. I want your strength. Westerburg does not need mushy togetherness. It needs a strong leader."
—J.D., Heathers
"Is not this simpler? Is this not your natural state? It's the unspoken truth of humanity, that you crave subjugation. The bright lure of freedom diminishes your life's joy in a mad scramble for power, for identity. You were made to be ruled. In the end, you will always kneel."
Literature
The king will take your daughters from you and force them to cook and bake perfumes for him. He will take away the best of your fields and vineyards and olive groves and give them to his own servants. He will take a tenth of your harvest and distribute it among his officers and attendants. He will want your male and female slaves and demand the finest of your young men and donkeys for his own use. He will demand a tenth of your flocks and you will all be his slaves. When that day comes you will beg for relief from this king you are demanding but the Lord will not help you." But the people refused to listen to Samuel's warning. "Even so we still want a king!" they said. "We want to be like the nations around us. Our king will govern us and lead us into battle.
Oh, what a wonderous work is a man! wrote a man.
— Gore Vidal, Kalki
The truth is that every intelligent man, as you know, dreams of being a gangster and of ruling over society by force alone. As it is not so easy as the detective novels might lead one to believe, one generally relies on politics and joins the cruelest party. What does it matter, after all, if by humiliating one's mind one succeeds in dominating every one? I discovered in myself sweet dreams of oppression.
— Albert Camus, The Fall
Protection is the first necessity of opulence and luxury.
— Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent (1907)
Probably human cruelty is fixed and eternal. Only styles change.
— Martin Amis, Time's Arrow
Chaos is deadlier than tyranny. More of these multicides result from the breakdown of authority rather than the exercise of authority. In comparison to a handful of dictators such as Idi Amin and Saddam Hussein who exercised their absolute power to kill hundreds of thousands, I found more and deadlier upheavals like the Time of Troubles, the Chinese Civil War, and the Mexican Revolution where no one exercised enough control to stop the death of millions.
— Matthew White, Atrocitology: Humanity's 100 Deadliest Achievements
Live-Action TV
I don't always like the way Londo does things — well, me and most civilized worlds — but you know, sometimes he's right.
— Vir Cotto, Babylon 5 ("No Surrender, No Retreat")
"Zein has a zero-tolerance policy against malice. It seeks to rule the world with an iron fist. Based on its understanding, Zein has come into the conclusion that in order to expunge all malice, it needs the extinction of mankind."
Odo: Give me the right to set a curfew, let me do more searches of arriving passengers, give me fifty more deputies!
Kira: And this station will be just the way it was during the occupation.
Odo: Say what you like. It was safer then.
Kira: And this station will be just the way it was during the occupation.
Odo: Say what you like. It was safer then.
— Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, "The Maquis Pt. 1"
Music
If there's one thing you can say about mankind
There's nothing kind about man
There's nothing kind about man
—"Misery Is The River Of The World", Tom Waits
Because in all of the whole human race, Mrs. Lovett,
There are two kinds of men, and only two:
There's the one staying put in his proper place,
And the one with his foot in the other one's face!
There are two kinds of men, and only two:
There's the one staying put in his proper place,
And the one with his foot in the other one's face!
— '"Epiphany", 'Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street''
Toys
"Peace through tyranny"
— Megatron's Tech Specs motto, Transformers: Generation 1
Video Games
A man does not eat an omelette without breaking eggs! Blood is the price of progress! It is the ink in which history's pages are writ! Look around you, boy! Ivalice rots from within! Your brother would carve out the root of its decay, even if it means his hands must needs be soiled!
—- Gafgarion, Final Fantasy Tactics
People don't want freedom. They want boundaries and rules. Protection. From invaders, and from themselves. People need a leader who can give them both the support and constraints to keep chaos at bay. You give them that, and they'll follow. And that's where I come in.
Jonathan Irons, CEO Atlas PMC, Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare Reveal Trailer
A strong, guiding hand is essential to the success of any civilization - the alternative would be anarchy and chaos. It is the duty of the state to steer its citizens towards the paths that are the most productive.
— Authoritarian description, Stellaris
Empathy: Do you believe the status quo is preferable to chaos and bloodshed?
The Detective: No.
Empathy: Then you've never lived through *real* chaos.
The Detective: No.
Empathy: Then you've never lived through *real* chaos.
Web Original
Bob McKimson showed the world to be a hornet's nest of swindlers and wiseasses who go through life shouting, manhandling and pushing each other around - just like real life would be if we were unfettered by political correctness and insincere manners.
Why are we all so keen on death? Could it be that everyone, deep down, shares my belief that the only quick solution for humanity's problems is to kill a random sampling of about one half to two third's of the world's population, grind up their meat and then feed it to the remainder?
At first you'll question the morality of stealing from people, or killing the innocent for their organs, but the game pushes and then breaks you like a pencil - true nihilism in the end, where any means is justified by the end.
Has something shifted in our culture? Can we blame this on 9/11? Or, has the darkness we used to put in our novels and saddest music just finally bled out into film and TV? Either way, it's pretty weird that the Coen Brothers started their careers mocking nihilists, then went on to make No Country for Old Men, the nihilist ... ist film ever made.
One hardly wants to live in a world run by Malcolm Tucker; it seems scarcely more satisfying or comfortable than one run by idiots. Nevertheless, it’s the then reed of salvation and hope the show offers — that in the face of the right kind of bastard we might somehow all be OK.
Humans, now in a fallen condition, are continually trying to one up each other. Even members of one's own family or friends attempt to gain power over each other. As Nietzsche pointed out, virtually all human behavior is motivated by the "Will to Power." Nature even rewards people with more power as they live longer, feel happier, and have higher levels of serotonin in their brain. People band together in an attempt to dominate other groups even more thoroughly. Wars, racism, economic competition, cutting remarks at parties, domestic violence can all be traced back to the urge to dominate others...The desire for power makes the entire project of the Left an impossibility.
Western Animation
You need me, Springfield. Oh, your guilty conscience may move you to vote Democratic, but deep down, you long for a cold-hearted Republican to lower taxes, brutalize criminals, and rule you like a king!
— Sideshow Bob, The Simpsons ("Sideshow Bob Roberts")
Before a society can move forward, all must agree on the rules. Now kneel!
— Galvatron (upon conquering a planet for the Decepticons), The Transformers ("Fight or Flee")
Real Life
After me, comes the flood.
— Louis XV
Once abroad in the wilderness, they revel in the freedom from social constraint and compensate for their long confinement in the quietude of their own community. They revert to the innocence of wild animals: we can imagine them returning from an orgy of murder, arson, rape, and torture, jubilant and at peace with themselves.
We make allowance for a certain degree of selfishness in men; because we know it to be inseparable from human nature, and inherent in our frame and constitution. By this reflexion we correct those sentiments of blame, which so naturally arise upon any opposition.
— David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature
The room being hung around with a collection of the portraits of remarkable men, among them were those of Bacon, Newton and Locke. Hamilton asked me who they were. I told him they were my trinity of the three greatest men the world had ever produced, naming them. He paused for some time: 'The greatest man,' said he, 'that ever lived, was Julius Caesar.'
— Thomas Jefferson on Alexander Hamilton, 1811
So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly rise and make them miserable.
— Aldous Huxley, Ends and Means (1937)
Usury is the cancer of the world, which only the surgeon's knife of fascism can cut out of the life of the nations.
— Ezra Pound, What is Money For?
Life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim.
Trust is good. Control is better.
If I had been an Italian I am sure that I should have been whole-heartedly with you from the start to finish in your triumphant struggle against the bestial appetites and passions of Leninism.
— Winston Churchill, speaking in Rome on 1.20.1927 in praise of Mussolini
The Truth Apparent, apparent to everyone's eyes how are not blinded by dogmatism, is that men are perhaps weary of Liberty.
— Benito Mussolini, 1934
It cannot be denied that Fascism and similar movements aiming at the establishment of dictatorships are full of the best intentions and that their intervention has, for the moment, saved European civilization. The merit that Fascism has thereby won for itself will live on eternally in history. But though its policy has brought salvation for the moment, it is not of the kind which could promise continued success. Fascism was an emergency makeshift. To view it as something more would be a fatal error.
— Ludwig von Mises, Liberalism
They were told that love — indiscriminate love for one's fellow man — is the highest virtue, and they obeyed....When they discovered this philosophy did not work, because in fact it cannot work, the hippies had neither the wit nor the courage to challenge it.
— Ayn Rand, Apollo and Dionysus
Well, I would say that, as long-term institutions, I am totally against dictatorships. But a dictatorship may be a necessary system for a transitional period. At times it is necessary for a country to have, for a time, some form or other of dictatorial power.
— F.A. Hayek on Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet
Thatcherism was the rodent slowly stirring in my viscera: the uneasy but unbanishable feeling that on some essential matters she might be right.
This was my first taste of nationalist triumphalism in wartime. There was almost no one I could speak with. A populace that had agitated for change now outdid itself to lionize uniformed killers. All bowed before the state. It taught me a crucial lesson that I would carry into every other conflict. Lurking beneath the surface of every society, including ours, is the passionate yearning for a nationalist cause that exalts us, the kind that war alone is able to deliver.
— Chris Hedges on the Falklands War, War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning
Europeans have sometimes been beguiled by a despotism that comes concealed in the seductive form of an ideal — as it did in the cases of Hitler and Stalin. This fact may remind us that the possibility of despotism is remote neither in space nor in time.
— Kenneth Minogue, Politics: A Very Short Introduction
Liberalism itself has failed, and for a pretty good reason. It has been too often compromised by the people who represented it.
— Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72
I really am a pessimist. I've always felt that fascism is a more natural governmental condition than democracy. Democracy is a grace. It's something essentially splendid because it's not at all routine or automatic. Fascism goes back to our infancy and childhood, where we were always told how to live. We were told, Yes, you may do this; no, you may not do that. So the secret of fascism is that it has this appeal to people whose later lives are not satisfactory.
Well, if we wait for an ecological disaster, it'll be too late...we'd probably have a fascist takeover—with everybody agreeing to it, because that would be the only method for survival that anybody could think of. I'd even agree to it, because there just aren't any other alternatives around right now.
— Noam Chomsky on anthropocentric climate change, Understanding Power
Caesar pacified Gaul by mass slaughter; he then used his successful army to crush all political opposition at home and establish himself as permanent ruler of ancient Rome. This brilliant action not only ended the personal threat to Caesar, but ended the civil chaos that was threatening anarchy in ancient Rome – thus marking the start of the ancient Roman Empire that gave peace and prosperity to the known world.
If President Bush copied Julius Caesar by ordering his army to empty Iraq of Arabs and repopulate the country with Americans, he would achieve immediate results: popularity with his military; enrichment of America by converting an Arabian Iraq into an American Iraq (therefore turning it from a liability to an asset); and boost American prestige while terrifying American enemies.
If President Bush copied Julius Caesar by ordering his army to empty Iraq of Arabs and repopulate the country with Americans, he would achieve immediate results: popularity with his military; enrichment of America by converting an Arabian Iraq into an American Iraq (therefore turning it from a liability to an asset); and boost American prestige while terrifying American enemies.
—Philosopher Phillip Atkinson, 2007 essay on democracy (now deleted)
Can I just make a special request in the magic lamp? Can we get like Netanyahu, or like Putin in for 48 hours, you know, head of the United States? I don’t know. I just want somebody to get in here and get it done right so that Americans don’t have to worry and wake up in the morning fearful of a group that’s murderous and horrific like ISIS.
— Kimberly Guilfoyle, The Five 8.25.14
This is a terrible truth that we have to face: the only thing that currently stands between us and the roiling ocean of Muslim unreason is a wall of tyranny and human rights abuses that we have helped to erect.
— Sam Harris, The End of Faith
Also [Adolf Hitler] has grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life. Nearly all western thought since the last war, certainly all “progressive” thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security and avoidance of pain. In such a view of life there is no room, for instance, for patriotism and the military virtues. [...]Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades. However they may be as economic theories, Fascism and Nazism are psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life. The same is probably true of Stalin’s militarised version of Socialism. All three of the great dictators have enhanced their power by imposing intolerable burdens on their peoples. Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people “I offer you a good time,” Hitler has said to them “I offer you struggle, danger and death,” and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet.
— George Orwell, review of Mein Kampf
The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. ...We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. ...In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons...who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.
— Edward Bernays, Propaganda
