The Great Dictator Quotes

“Keep your head down, think small, look after yourself: these constituted the lessons of Leopold. The spirit, once comprehensively crushed, does not recover easily. For seventy-five years, from 1885 to 1960, Congo's population had marinated in humiliation. No malevolent witch-doctor could have devised a better preparation for the coming of a second Great Dictator.”

— Michela Wrong

“People who dream when they sleep at night know of a special kind of happiness which the world of the day holds not, a placid ecstasy, and ease of heart, that are like honey on the tongue. They also know that the real glory of dreams lies in their atmosphere of unlimited freedom. It is not the freedom of the dictator, who enforces his own will on the world, but the freedom of the artist, who has no will, who is free of will. The pleasure of the true dreamer does not lie in the substance of the dream, but in this: that there things happen without any interference from his side, and altogether outside his control. Great landscapes create themselves, long splendid views, rich and delicate colours, roads, houses, which he has never seen or heard of ...”

— Karen Blixen

“Evil itself is a dictator, whether it's dressed up like a pompous little man with a moustache, or a bunch of faceless terrorists, or a fundamentalist state. That's what the devil is, you know. And it's precious difficult to combat. Or rather, it's not so much difficult, as demanding of great courage. Will, and wit.”

— Chico Kidd

“Obviously, every dictator pays a great deal of attention to who is running the army. There's always a base right outside the capitol to protect the head of government.”

— Elliott Abrams

“There are two main methodologies of open source development. There's the Apache model, which is design by committee - great for things like web servers. Then you have the benevolent dictator model. That's what Ubuntu is doing, with Mark Shuttleworth.”

— Matt Mullenweg

“I was always a big fan of Charlie Chaplin movies. I love 'The Great Dictator' and 'City Lights.'”

— Jack Reynor

“I do like to teach. Sitting in my great chair at school, I used to consider myself as some dictator at the head of a commonwealth ... To fire a newborn soul with ardor for learning! At that time I thought the world could afford no greater pleasure.' - Those Who Love, p. 177”

— Irving Stone

“I sometimes, in my sprightly moments, consider myself, in my great chair at school, as some dictator at the head of a common-wealth. In this little state I can discover all the great geniuses, all the surprising actions and revolutions of the great world in miniature. I have several renowned generals but three feet high, and several deep-projecting politicians in petticoats. I have others catching and dissecting flies, accumulating remarkable pebbles, cockleshells, etc., with as ardent curiosity as any virtuoso in the Royal Society ... . At one table sits Mr. Insipid foppling and fluttering, spinning his whirligig, or playing with his fingers as gaily and wittily as any Frenchified coxcomb brandishes his cane and rattles his snuff box. At another sits the polemical divine, plodding and wrangling in his mind about Adam's fall in which we sinned, all as his primer has it.”

— John Adams

“In the creative process, my ego has always been a huge tyrant ... a dictator and kind of rude and very misleading, because sometimes when I'm doing something, I say, "This is great! This is fantastic! Very genius!" And 20 minutes later, I feel like a dead jellyfish. "You are a stupid a**hole. This is a piece of sh*t. Nobody will care about it."”

— Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu

“Dictatorship played a decisive role in the North's successful effort to maintain the Union by force of arms ... one man was the government of the United States ... Lincoln was a great dictator ... This great constitutional dictator was self appointed.”

— Clinton Rossiter

“As an artist, it's a great opportunity to play a character like this [Ugandan dictator Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland]. And then, as a person, I had never been to the African continent. So, I knew, personally, it would reshape me.”

— Forest Whitaker

“China is not a great idea: capitalism and a dictator. It's like the two worst possible things you could imagine together. It's a very bad idea.”

— Fran Lebowitz

“Had I known of the actual horrors of the German concentration camps, I could not have made The Great Dictator, I could not have made fun of the homicidal insanity of the Nazis.”

— Charlie Chaplin

“Wealth is a form of power in our society. With great power comes great responsibility. If you have too much wealth, ipso facto, you have too much power - therefore you have too much responsibility - and you're a kind of dictator.”

— Will Self

“Today, former President Bill Clinton met with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il and convinced him to release two American journalists that have been jailed since March. Isn't that great? This is big, yeah. Or as Clinton calls it, another Asian happy ending.”

— Conan O'Brien