Partnership is the way. Dictatorial win-lose is so old-school.
To me the truth comes first and then the literature. We in China are dealing with a dictatorial system and we writers have to take a stance on it.
If you are a Steve Earle and you're up on a platform and there are people out there listening to you, say something to them. Tell them something valuable. Tell them something they need to know. It doesn't have to be dictatorial, it just has to be informative.
The Arab awakening has been, up to now, a lot about freedom from dictatorial regimes - Syria, Yemen, Libya, Tunisia, Bahrain and Egypt. But once you got freedom from, then you need freedom to. Freedom from is about destroying things. Freedom to is about constructing things, constructing the rule of law.
We've got a dictatorial president and a Justice Department that does not want Congress involved. Your guy's acting like he's king. His dad was at a 90 percent approval rating and he lost! And the same thing can happen to him!
The fallacy is to believe that under a dictatorial government you can be free inside
If love exists between two persons, it is blessed. If love does not exist between two persons, then all your laws put together cannot bridge them. Then they exist separate, then they exist apart, then they exist in conflict, then they exist always in war. And they create all kinds of trouble for each other. They are nasty to each other, nagging to each other, possessive of each other, violent, oppressive, dominating, dictatorial.
In a free world there is, alas, more common crime than in a dictatorial system.
Dictatorial regimes often manage to keep themselves in power because they are recognized by foreigners as representing the state and its people, and therefore as entitled to sell the country's natural resources and to borrow money in its people's name. These privileges conferred by foreigners keep autocrats in power despite the fact that they were not elected and do not rule in the interest of the population.
I am not invested with dictatorial powers. If I were, I should be quite ready to dictate.
The other matter to which we beg leave to refer in candor has been the anxiety shown for the Constitution and civil liberties because of alleged dictatorial, impatient and vindictive tendencies on our part. This concern is without basis in fact.
With each newly minted crisis, US leaders roll out the same time-tested scenario. They start demonizing a foreign leader. . . charging them with being communistic or otherwise dictatorial, dangerously aggressive, power hungry, genocidal, given to terrorism or drug trafficking, ready to deny us access to vital resources, harboring weapons of mass destruction, or just inexplicably "anti-American" and "anti-West. " Lacking any information to the contrary, the frightened public. . . are swept along.