Tryanny Quotes

“It’s not just absolute power that the Founders sought to prevent. Implicit in its structure, in the very idea of ordered liberty, was a rejection of absolute truth, the infallibility of any idea or ideology or theology or “ism,” any tyrannical consistency that might lock future generations into a single, unalterable course, or drive both majorities and minorities into the cruelties of the Inquisition, the pogrom, the gulag, or the jihad. The Founders may have trusted in God, but true to the Enlightenment spirit, they also trusted in the minds and senses that God had given them. They were suspicious of abstraction and liked asking questions, which is why at every turn in our early history theory yielded to fact and necessity.”
― Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream

“In the forbidden zone of interpretation, the tyranny of language becomes the poisoned-tip of the bureaucratic spear.”
― Stewart Stafford

“Where Storms Nest by Stewart Stafford

Time's arrow has left its quiver,
And mortal men denied a sliver,
Of sweet-faced solace or settled debt,
Surrendering all to sweeping death.

Beware the vixen with the perished pup,
Of merciless slight and sacrilegious sup,
Of mother's milk and witches' brew,
Curdling infamy and death's-head stew.

The trap is sprung, the rider unseated,
A mourning procession for the defeated,
A great wrong sits on the anointed throne,
She is Queen Bee and you, but a drone.

From a spider's web veil, she does regard,
Hateful glances from black heart's shard,
Envenomed nature of poisonous Man,
The scorpion's strike of a foul plan.

After seeking power and blood and lust,
Remorse a late guest to a dagger's thrust,
The vulture shrieks to the globe's outer rim,
That Man's ambition is a Hell to him.

© Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford

“A king who kills his subordinates to keep his power over them has no power when they're dead.”
― Kate Stradling, The Heir and the Spare

“A Mountebank Muses by Stewart Stafford

Permit my monstrous vanity to grow,
As I school you in power's stratagem,
And all its dark, dripping uses.

Gentle Nature, beauteous savage,
The human beast a tool of it,
So I shall yield to primal urges.

A "hero", that convenient scarecrow,
Valourous through wicked deeds,
The "unworthy", slain with a judging sword.

Virtue signals at tyranny's bloodlust,
Rending animal flesh with your teeth,
Blind to complicit slaughter and pain.

Crowing masses at fame’s summit,
Unpruned roses of bloody slopes below,
Atrocity, the stepping stone to glory.

I shall wipe the stain off the crown,
And all the crimes that precede it,
Conferred by the fates, entitled for life.

© 2023, Stewart Stafford. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford