Tyrant Quotes

“Shakespeare believed that . . . tyrants and their minions would ultimately fail, brought down by their own viciousness and by a popular spirit of humanity that could be suppressed but never completely extinguished. The best chance for the recovery of collective decency lay, he thought, in the political action of ordinary citizens. He never lost sight of . . . the hungry citizen who demanded economic justice. 'What is the city but the people?”
― Stephen Greenblatt, Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics

“Populism may look like an embrace of the have-nots, but in reality it is a form of cynical exploitation. The unscrupulous leader has no actual interest in bettering the lot of the poor. Surrounded from birth with great wealth, his tastes run to extravagant luxuries, and he finds nothing remotely appealing the lives of underclasses... But he sees that they can be made to further his ambition.”
― Stephen Greenblatt, Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics

“Even in systems that have multiple moderating institutions, the chief executive almost always has considerable power. But what happens when that executive is not mentally fit to hold office? What if he begins to make decisions that threaten the well-being and security of the realm?”
― Stephen Greenblatt, Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics

“Populism may look like an embrace of the have-nots, but in reality it is a form of cynical exploitation.”
― Stephen Greenblatt, Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics

“He is pathologically narcissistic and supremely arrogant. He has a grotesque sense of entitlement, never doubting that he can do whatever he chooses. He loves to bark orders and to watch underlings scurry to carry them out. He expects absolute loyalty, but he is incapable of gratitude. The feelings of others mean nothing to him. He has no natural grace, no sense of shared humanity, no decency.”
― Stephen Greenblatt, Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics

“Shakespeare did not think that tyrants ever lasted for very long. However cunning they were in their rise, once in power they were surprisingly incompetent. Possessing no vision for the country they ruled, they were incapable of fashioning enduring support, and though they were cruel and violent, they could never crush all of the opposition. Their isolation, suspicion, and anger, often conjoined to an arrogant overconfidence, hastened their downfall. The plays that depict tyranny inevitably end at least with gestures toward the renewal of community and the restoration of legitimate order.”
― Stephen Greenblatt, Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics

“In ordinary times, when a public figure is caught in a lie or simply reveals blatant ignorance of the truth, his standing is diminished. But these are not ordinary times. If a dispassionate bystander were to point out all of Cade’s grotesque distortions, mistakes, and downright lies, the crowd’s anger would light on the skeptic and not on Cade.”
― Stephen Greenblatt, Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics

“Shakespeare grappled again and again with a deeply unsettling question: how is it possible for a whole country to fall into the hands of a tyrant?”
― Stephen Greenblatt, Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics

“It is extremely dangerous to have a state run by someone who governs by impulse.”
― Stephen Greenblatt, Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics

“The institutions of a free society are designed to ward off those who would govern, as Buchanan put it, “not for their country but for themselves, who take account not of the public interest but of their own pleasure.”
― Stephen Greenblatt, Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics

“A succession of murders clears the field of most of the significant impediments, actual or potential, to Richard’s seizing power. But it is striking that Shakespeare does not envisage the tyrant’s climactic accession to the throne as the direct result of violence. Instead, it is the consequence of an election. To solicit a popular mandate, Richard conducts a political campaign, complete with a fraudulent display of religious piety, the slandering of opponents, and a grossly exaggerated threat to national security. Why”
― Stephen Greenblatt, Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics

“Then there are those who cannot keep in focus that Richard is as bad as he seems to be. They know that he is a pathological liar and they see perfectly well that he has done this or that ghastly thing, but they have a strange penchant for forgetting, as if it were hard work to remember just how awful he is. They are drawn irresistibly to normalize what is not normal.”
― Stephen Greenblatt, Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics

“He [Cade] promises to make England great again. How will he do that? He shows the crowd at once: he attacks education.”
― Stephen Greenblatt, Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics

“Tyrannical power is more easily exercised when it appears that the old order continues to exist. The reassuring consensual structures may now be hollowed out and merely decorative, but they are all still in place, so that the bystanders, who crave psychological security and a sense of well-being, can persuade themselves that the rule of law is being upheld.”
― Stephen Greenblatt, Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics

“The patricians urge [Coriolanus] to set aside his most deeply held convictions for the purpose of getting elected. They want him to lie and to pander and to play the demagogue. Once he is securely in office, there will be plenty of time for him to resume his actual stance and to roll back the concessions that have been made to the poor. It is the most familiar of political games: the plutocrat, born into every privilege and inwardly contemptuous of those beneath him, who mouths the rhetoric of populism during the electoral campaign, abandoning it as soon as it has served his purposes. The Romans had boiled it all down to a conventional performance, comparable to a well-coiffed politician's donning of a hard hat at a rally held at a construction site...”
― Stephen Greenblatt, Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics

“In . . . Menenius Agrippa, Shakespeare draws a deft portrait of a successful conservative politician, altogether in the camp of the rich but adept at presenting himself as the people's friend.”
― Stephen Greenblatt, Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics

“It is an heretic that makes the fire, Not she which burns in’t. (2.3.114–15)”
― Stephen Greenblatt, Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics

“Finally, there a motley crowd of those who carry out his orders, some reluctantly but simply eager to avoid trouble; others with gusto, hoping to seize something along the way for themselves; still others enjoying the cruel game of making his targets, often high in the social hierarchy, suffer and die. The aspiring tyrant never lacks for such people, in Shakespeare and, from what I can tell, in life. True, there might be a world somewhere where this does not happen. Such is the world that Montaigne’s friend Étienne de La Boétie once envisaged, where the dictator would fall simply because of a massive, nonviolent refusal to cooperate. He would call for some strawberries or for a round of executions, and no one would move a muscle. But Shakespeare seems to have regarded such a proto-Gandhian idea as hopeless pie in the sky. He thought that the tyrant would always find willing executioners, men who would, in Hamlet’s phrase, “make love to this employment” (Hamlet 5.2.57).”
― Stephen Greenblatt, Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics

“Persuading him to do so is no easy task. In this attempt, Menenius is joined by Volumnia, who shares his frustration that the stiff-necked Coriolanus could not dissemble just long enough to be elected. “Lesser had been/The taxings of your dispositions,” she tells her son, “if/You had not showed them how ye were disposed/Ere they lacked power to cross you” (3.2.20–23). Coriolanus’s response is “Let them hang,” to which his mother adds, “Ay, and burn too” (3.2.23–24). But cursing the people will not solve the problem. The only intelligent course of action, she says, is for Coriolanus to do what, in effect, the elite have always known how to do: to speak To th’ people, not by your own instruction, Nor by th’ matter which your heart prompts you, But with such words that are but roted in Your tongue, though but bastards and syllables Of no allowance to your bosom’s truth. (3.2.52–57) Just lie. Everyone shares this view, she assures him: “Your wife, your son, these senators, the nobles” (3.2.65). It is in Coriolanus’s power to solve the crisis he has provoked. The price he needs to pay is simply to behave, for once, like a politician. But for him this price is unbearably high. Everything in Coriolanus’s being—the fierce integrity and pride and spirit of command he has imbibed from his mother—rebels against playing so degrading a part. And the conflict is all the more unbearable because it is precisely his mother who now urges him to debase himself. “I prithee now, sweet son,” she tells him, as thou hast said My praises made thee first a soldier, so To have my praise for this, perform a part Thou hast not done before. (3.2.107–10) Volumnia understands perfectly well that her son’s sense of his manhood is at stake and that he has shaped his whole identity from the beginning by trying to please her. The scars that cover his body were never meant for theatrical display before the people; they were adornments offered only to her. But now, devastatingly enough, she tells him that he has been trying too hard: “You might have been enough the man you are/With striving less to be so” (3.2.19–20). Or, rather, he hears from his mother a demand for a different, even more painful form of masochism. She wants him, in his view, to be a beggar, a knave, a weeping schoolboy, or a whore. Worse still, she wants his “throat of war” to be turned “into a pipe/Small as an eunuch” (3.2.112–14). All right, he says, for her and her alone, he will in effect castrate himself: “Mother, I am going to the marketplace”
― Stephen Greenblatt, Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics

“Nothing tempers Coriolanus’s obnoxiousness, and yet the play is oddly sympathetic to him, at least compared with the others of his class. The patricians urge him to set aside his most deeply held convictions for the purpose of getting elected. They want him to lie and to pander and to play the demagogue. Once he is securely in office, there will be plenty of time for him to resume his actual stance and to roll back the concessions that have been made to the poor. It is the most familiar of political games: the plutocrat, born into every privilege and inwardly contemptuous of those beneath him, who mouths the rhetoric of populism during the electoral campaign, abandoning it as soon as it has served his purposes. The Romans had boiled it all down to a conventional performance, comparable to a well-coiffed politician’s donning of a hard hat at a rally held at a construction site: the candidate for office would set aside his richly dyed robes and, entering the marketplace, put on a threadbare white garment, “the napless vesture of humility” (2.1.222). Then, if he had any battle scars, he would show them, like a résumé, and solicit the people’s votes.”
― Stephen Greenblatt, Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics

“The wealthy patricians in this play regard the poor as worthless, but the reverse is not true. Shakespeare conjures up the conversations going on throughout the city, as humble people attempt to balance self-interest and obligation, rights and indebtedness. “If he do require our voices,” one of the plebeians says, “we ought not to deny him.” “We may, sir,” another counters, “if we will.” “We have the power in ourselves to do it,” replies a third, “but it is a power that we have no power to do” (2.3.1–5). These are, as Shakespeare depicts them, the small but precious perplexities of free elections.”
― Stephen Greenblatt, Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics

“While all of this is going on, Richard continues with his plan to marry his young niece, and in doing so he reveals a further feature that Shakespeare associated with tyranny: utter shamelessness. Though he has caused the murder of her two sons, he has the fathomless effrontery to approach Elizabeth, the widow of the late king, and propose that he marry her daughter. He does not even bother to deny his crime; instead, he proposes to repair the loss of her children by giving her grandchildren!”
― Stephen Greenblatt, Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics

“Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look,” Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar famously remarks. “He thinks too much; such men are dangerous” (Julius Caesar 1.2.194–95). Antony attempts to reassure him—“He’s not dangerous”—but Caesar is unconvinced: “He reads much,/He is a great observer, and he looks/Quite through the deeds of men” (1.2.196, 201–3). These are not qualities that men like Caesar want anywhere near them: “Let me have men about me that are fat,/Sleek-headed men, and such as sleep a-nights” (1.2.192–93).”
― Stephen Greenblatt, Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics

“THERE IS A TOUCH of comedy in the tyrant’s rise to power, catastrophe though it is. The people he has pushed aside and trampled on are for the most part themselves compromised, cynical, or corrupt. Even if their fates are ghastly, it is satisfying to see them get their comeuppance, and as we watch the schemer bluster and connive and betray his way to the top, we are invited to take a kind of moral vacation. But once Richard reaches his lifelong goal—at the end of the third act of Shakespeare’s play—the laughter quickly begins to curdle. Much of the pleasure of his winning derived from its wild improbability. Now the prospect of endless winning proves to be a grotesque delusion. Though he has seemed a miracle of dark efficiency, Richard is quite unprepared to unite and run a whole country. The tyrant’s triumph is based on lies and fraudulent promises braided around the violent elimination of rivals. The cunning strategy that brings him to the throne hardly constitutes a vision for the realm; nor has he assembled counselors who can help him formulate one. He can count—for the moment, at least—on the acquiescence of such suggestible officials as the London mayor and frightened clerks like the scribe. But the new ruler possesses neither administrative ability nor diplomatic skill, and no one in his entourage can supply what he manifestly lacks. His own mother despises him. His wife, Anne, fears and hates him. Cynical operators like Catesby and Ratcliffe are hardly suited to be statesmen. Though higher in social station, they differ little from the hoodlums Richard hires to do his bidding. Lord Stanley cuts a more plausible figure as a prudent adviser—and the play depicts him reluctantly conveying the king’s wishes—but, as his early nightmare suggests, he has long been afraid of “the boar” and can hardly be expected to serve as a linchpin of the upstart regime. Secretly he is already in contact with the regime’s mortal enemies.”
― Stephen Greenblatt, Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics

“Up to this point, midway through the Henry VI trilogy, there have been very few glimpses of those at the bottom. Politics has been almost entirely the affair of the elites, who maneuver against one another, while the anonymous masses of messengers, servants, soldiers, guards, artisans, and peasants remain in the shadows. Now, suddenly and unexpectedly, the cast of characters changes: York sees an opportunity to forge an alliance with the miserable, overlooked, and ignorant lower classes, and he seizes upon it. And we learn that the hitherto invisible and silent poor are seething with anger. Party warfare cynically makes use of class warfare. The goal is to create chaos, which will set the stage for the tyrant’s seizure of power.”
― Stephen Greenblatt, Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics

“These high-level political figures are playing a peculiar game. No one in the group believes for a moment that Duke Humphrey must be murdered in order to protect the king or save the state. Every word they speak is a lie, and each of the plotters is merely projecting his or her own predominant vice onto the intended victim. Since they are not in public, why don’t they simply say what they mean? There are several possible answers. First, they are all politicians and, therefore, congenitally dishonest; the word “politician,” for Shakespeare, was virtually synonymous with hypocrite. (“Get thee glass eyes,” rages Lear. “And, like a scurvy politician,/Seem to see the things thou dost not” [King Lear 4.6.164–66]). Second, they distrust one another and do not know what may be reported outside the room in which they are speaking. Third, each harbors a secret hope that their lie and theirs alone will deceive the others. Fourth, pretending that they are virtuous, even when they know that they are not, makes them feel better about themselves. And fifth, they are all warily watching to see if anyone among them expresses even a slight reservation about the conspiracy, anything that would lead it to unravel. They want everyone to be on board.”
― Stephen Greenblatt, Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics

“At the beginning of the scene, when called upon to offer his opinion on one side or another of the legal argument, the Earl of Warwick holds back. He may know something about dogs and hawks, he genially declares, but in such highly technical matters—“these nice sharp quillets of the law” (2.4.17)—he professes to be no wiser than a jackdaw, a proverbially stupid bird. But by the scene’s end, in the wake of the formation of the parties, his restraint has vanished: he has plucked the white rose and is eager for blood. “This brawl today,” he prophesies, Grown to this faction in the Temple Garden, Shall send between the red rose and the white A thousand souls to death and deadly night. (2.4.124–28) The obscure legal difference has not fundamentally changed, no new occasion for dispute has arisen, and there does not seem to be an underlying cause such as greed or jealousy. But the party rage seems to have a life of its own. Suddenly everyone seems to be boiling over with potentially murderous aggression. It is as if, in the absence of the dominant figure of the king, the purely conventional and meaningless emblems precipitate a rush of both group solidarity and group loathing. This loathing is an important part of what leads to a social breakdown and, eventually, to tyranny. It makes the voice, even the very thought, of the opponent almost unendurable. You are either with me or against me—and if you are not with me, I hate you and want to destroy you and all of your adherents. Each party naturally seeks power, but seeking power becomes itself the expression of rage: I crave the power to crush you. Rage generates insults, and insults generate outrageous actions, and outrageous actions, in turn, heighten the intensity of the rage. It all begins to spiral out of control.”
― Stephen Greenblatt, Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics

“Drawing on an indifference to the truth, shamelessness, and hyperinflated self-confidence, the loudmouthed demagogue is entering a fantasyland—“ When I am king, as king I will be”—and he invites his listeners to enter the same magical space with him. In that space, two and two do not have to equal four, and the most recent assertion need not remember the contradictory assertion that was made a few seconds earlier.”
― Stephen Greenblatt, Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics

“How does a figure like Richard III or Macbeth ascend to the throne? Such a disaster, Shakespeare suggested, could not happen without widespread complicity. His plays probe the psychological mechanisms that lead a nation to abandon its ideals and even its self-interest. Why would anyone, he asked himself, be drawn to a leader manifestly unsuited to govern, someone dangerously impulsive or viciously conniving or indifferent to the truth? Why, in some circumstances, does evidence of mendacity, crudeness, or cruelty serve not as a fatal disadvantage but as an allure, attracting ardent followers?”
― Stephen Greenblatt, Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics

“...although the absurdity of the demagogue’s rhetoric was blatantly obvious, the laughter it elicited did not for a minute diminish its menace. Cade and his followers will not slink away because the traditional political elite and the entirety of the educated populace regard him as a jackass.”
― Stephen Greenblatt, Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics