The Painter's Keys Community For Artists The Painter's Keys, a book by Robert Genn

Search the Painter's Keys:

Search for an author:

To Subscribe: enter your email address and click "Go"

Absolutely free, no strings. Cancel at any time. You'll get the valuable twice-weekly letter only.

Your email address will not be lent, sold or put on any spam or other nasty list. Guaranteed.

Robert's worldwide gift that artists love to get.
Bob’s Best

Mastering colour, learning to paint, finding out how successful artists run their lives, or setting up an artist’s website--these are Robert Genn’s top picks of the best currently available DVDs and Downloads. They have been studied and evaluated by Robert and have received his unsolicited “Seal of Approval.” Check out the selection here.

Resource of Art Quotations

For researchers or artists just looking for inspiration, this is the world's largest collection of art quotes and sayings--online or in a book. It's entirely the work of volunteer subscribers and others. New art quotes are going in daily. Our staff will make all your entries searchable by author and subject. One word of caution--don't try to print it all out--you will run out of ink if you do.

Subscribe to the Free Twice-Weekly Letter: See our Welcome Letter about subscription benefits and an outline of the features of this website.

Receive daily art quotes through Twitter

Follow us on Twitter to receive daily inspirational art quotes as well as lots of other great info for artists.


«Truth Art Quotes

·previous quote category·

Search for another category:

Understanding Art Quotes»

·next quote category·

Tyranny Art Quotes

52 art quotes about Tyranny | Submit more Tyranny art quotes

It is not the office of art to spotlight alternatives, but to resist by its form alone the course of the world, which permanently puts a pistol to men's heads. (Theodor W. Adorno)

Everything that has ever been called folk art has always reflected domination. (Theodor W. Adorno)

Those are the murderers of art who are sitting on the top wearing crowns of fake intelligence. Let me bring them down with the power of my art, without delaying the matter further. (Jeet Aulakh)

The first revolt is against the supreme tyranny of theology, of the phantom of God. (Mikhail Bakunin)

Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing, you hold down the adjoining. (Saul Bellow)

oratory, n. A conspiracy between speech and action to cheat the understanding. A tyranny tempered by stenography. (Ambrose Bierce)

The great thing about art is that it isn't democratic, it isn't intrinsically populist. Anyone with a bit of belief can attempt to impose their view upon everyone else. It also values and explores fringe opinion in a way that mainstream activities cannot and will not do. At the end of the day artists are dictators but on the whole benign ones. (Paul Brandford)

The tyrant grinds down his slaves and they don't turn against him, they crush those beneath them. (Emily Bronte)

When people have no other tyrant, their own public opinion becomes one. (Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton)

The tyranny of a multitude is a multiplied tyranny. (Edmund Burke)

He that complies against his will is of his own opinion still. (Samuel Butler, novelist)

-Journey to the End of the Night...
There's no tyrant like a brain. (Louis-Ferdinand Celine)

Modern toleration is really a tyranny. It is a tyranny because it is a silence. (G. K. Chesterton)

The road to tyranny, we must never forget, begins with the destruction of the truth. (Bill Clinton)

The shape is cursed with the tyranny of the rectangle. (Sandy Davison)

One reproduces only that which is striking; that is to say, the necessary. Thus, one's recollections and inventions are liberated from the tyranny which nature exerts. (Edgar Degas)

The mob is the mother of tyrants. (Diogenes of Sinope)

Of all the tyrannies on human kind / The worst is that which persecutes the mind. (John Dryden)

Fragile as reason is and limited as law is as the institutionalized medium of reason, that's all we have standing between us and the tyranny of mere will and the cruelty of unbridled, undisciplined feeling. (Felix Frankfurter)

The only tyrant I accept in this world is the 'still small voice' within me. (Mahatma Gandhi)

Sometimes... we suffer from the tyranny of comparison. Contests, competitions, thrive on it. Who cares? (Robert Genn)

For a lot of us drawing is a tyranny which impedes freshness and spontaneity. (Robert Genn)

There're two people in the world that are not likeable: a master and a slave. (Nikki Giovanni)

All education is despotism. It is perhaps impossible for the young to be conducted without introducing in many cases the tyranny implicit in obedience. Go there; do that; read; write; rise; lie down – will perhaps forever be the language addressed to youth by age. (William Godwin)

Many kiss the hand they wish cut off. (George Herbert)

Political correctness is tyranny with manners. (Charlton Heston)

The lens is a tyranny. (David Hockney)

All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent. (Thomas Jefferson)

Tyranny or slavery, born of selfishness, are the two educational methods of parents; all gradations of tyranny or slavery. (Franz Kafka)

Art springs from life but it doesn't mean we have to be tyrannized by it. (Scott Kahn)

It's the tyranny of the norm. They are attempting to redefine normal as good. Normal can be controlled, is control. Good can't be. Good has a wildness to it. (Paul Kane)

A modern democracy is a tyranny whose borders are undefined; one discovers how far one can go only by traveling in a straight line until one is stopped. (Norman Mailer)

The women's movement is filled with tyrants, just as men's political movements are equally filled. (Norman Mailer)

Today the tyrant rules not by club or fist, but disguised as a market researcher, he shepherds his flocks in the ways of utility and comfort. (Marshall McLuhan)

There is no greater tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of the law and in the name of justice. (Baron de Montesquieu)

Any ideal system is its own worst enemy, and as soon as you start to implement visions of grandeur, they just fall apart and turn into tyranny. (Ben Nicholson)

Today we are engaged in a deadly global struggle for those who would intimidate, torture, and murder people for exercising the most basic freedoms. If we are to win this struggle and spread those freedoms, we must keep our own moral compass pointed in a true direction. (Barack Obama)

The majority of business men are not capable of an original thought, simply because they cannot escape the tyranny of reason. (David Ogilvy)

You can't escape your own period. Whether you take sides for or against, you're always in it. (Pablo Picasso)

This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector. (Plato)

Speak against unconscious oppression, / Speak against the tyranny of the unimaginative, / Speak against bonds. (Ezra Pound)

As artists and professionals, it is our obligation to enact our own internal revolution, a private insurrection inside our own skulls. In this uprising we free ourselves from the tyranny of consumer culture. (Steven Pressfield)

Tyranny knows no restraint of appetite. (Jim Rohn)

One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny. (Bertrand Russell)

Human beings cling to their delicious tyrannies and to their exquisite nonsense, till death stares them in the face. (Sydney Smith)

Beauty is a short-lived tyranny. (Socrates)

I'm willing to be regarded as a tyrant to keep my vision intact. (Twyla Tharp)

Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. (Henry David Thoreau)

A primary function of art and thought is to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture in the environmental sense and to permit him to stand beyond it in an autonomy of perception and judgment. (Lionel Trilling)

There is nothing more tyrannical than a strong popular feeling among a democratic people. (Anthony Trollope)

Those who want the government to regulate matters of the mind and spirit are like men who are so afraid of being murdered that they commit suicide to avoid assassination. (Harry S. Truman)

In a society that restricts individual freedoms and violates human rights, anything that calls itself creative or independent is a pretence. It is impossible for a totalitarian society to create anything with passion and imagination. (Ai Weiwei)


«Truth Art Quotes

·previous quote category·

Search for another category:

Understanding Art Quotes»

·next quote category·



back to Category Index

Editor: Robert Genn

Assistant Editor: Shawn Jackson

Associate Editors:

Scott Altman, Bonnie Austin, Karen Austin, Michele Becker, Joe Blodgett, Norman Brown, Alyce Bryson, Leanne Cadden, Penny Duane, Max Elliot, Derek Franklin, Sara Genn, Mardy Grothe, Harry Hartley, Sue Holland, Sue Legault, Tammy McManus, Eric Mewhinney, Bruce Miller, Laura Parrish, Andrea Pratt, Dan Roberts, Shirley Rochon, Gilbert Roy, John Sherlock, Victor Wong,
And many others who have so far contributed one quote or a few. Please join us and add more at

World's largest resource of art quotes, art sayings, creativity quotes,
painting quotes, famous art quotes, inspirational art quotes.

Robert's worldwide gift that artists love to get.

Absolutely free, no strings. Cancel at any time.
You'll get the valuable twice-weekly letter only.
Your email address will not be lent, sold or put
on any spam or other nasty list. Guaranteed.
CLICK HERE TO SUBSCRIBE FREE

Last modified: May 24, 2013