Necessity is the tyrant's plea. [ Milton ]

A tyrant is most tyrant to himself. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]

Love is a tyrant that spares no one. [ Corneille ]

Love reigns a very tyrant in my heart. [ Otway ]

What is more cruel than a tyrant's ear? [ Juvenal ]

Death is the tyrant of the imagination. [ Barry Cornwall ]

Is there no tyrant but the crowned one? [ Chenier ]

Fantastic tyrant of the amorous heart,
How hard thy yoke! how cruel is thy dart!
Those escape thy anger who refuse thy sway,
And those are punished most who most obey. [ Prior ]

The tyrant custom, most grave senators,
Hath made the flinty and steel couch of war
My thrice-driven bed of down. [ William Shakespeare ]

A wicked tyrant is better than a wicked war. [ Luther ]

Custom, 'tis true, a venerable tyrant
Over servile man extends her blind dominion. [ Thomson ]

Money amassed is either our slave or our tyrant. [ Horace ]

A popular license is indeed the many-headed tyrant. [ Sir P. Sidney ]

Love is the sovereign of youth and the tyrant of age.

No tyrant can take from you your knowledge and wisdom. [ Proverb ]

Cruelty is a tyrant that is always attended with fear. [ Proverb ]

With necessity, the tyrant's plea, excused his devilish deeds. [ Milton ]

The tyrant, it has been said, is but a slave turned inside out. [ Samuel Smiles ]

The sovereign is called a tyrant who knows no laws but his caprice. [ Voltaire ]

Love to a yielding heart is a king, but to a resisting is a tyrant. [ Sidney ]

Opinion is, as it were, the queen of the world, but force is its tyrant. [ Pascal ]

Old age is a tyrant that forbids the pleasures of youth on pain of death. [ La Rochefoucauld ]

Of all wild beasts, preserve me from a tyrant; and of all tame, a flatterer. [ Ben Jonson ]

Age is a tyrant who forbids at the penalty of life all the pleasures of youth. [ La Rochefoucauld ]

There is no tyrant like custom, and no freedom where its edicts are not resisted. [ Bovee ]

Logic is the essence of truth, and truth is the most powerful tyrant; and tyrants hate the truth. [ I. I. Kozlof ]

Fate is the friend of the good, the guide of the wise, the tyrant of the foolish, the enemy of the bad. [ W. R. Alger ]

The divine right of beauty is the only divine right a man can acknowledge, and a pretty woman the only tyrant he is not authorized to resist. [ Junius ]

Not the mountain ice, congealed to crystals, is so frosty chaste as thy victorious soul, which conquers man, and man's proud tyrant, passion. [ Dryden ]

Is not the mighty mind, that son of heaven! By tyrant life dethroned, imprisoned, pained? By death enlarged, ennobled, deifyed? Death but entombs the body; life the soul. [ Young ]

The man who is just and resolute will not be moved from his settled purpose, either by the misdirected rage of his fellow citizens, or by the threats of an imperious tyrant. [ Horace ]

Death is the tyrant of the imagination. His reign is in solitude and darkness, in tombs and prisons, over weak hearts and seething brains. He lives, without shape or sound, a phantasm, inaccessible to sight or touch - a ghastly and terrible apprehension. [ Barry Cornwall ]

Beauty gains little, and homeliness and deformity lose much, by gaudy attire. Lysander knew this was in part true, and refused the rich garments that the tyrant Dionysius proffered to his daughters, saying that they were fit only to make unhappy faces more remarkable. [ Zimmermann ]

Why doth Fate, that often bestows thousands of souls on a conqueror or tyrant, to be the sport of his passions, so often deny to the tenderest and most feeling hearts one kindred one on which to lavish their affections? Why is it that Love must so often sigh in vain for an object, and Hate never? [ Richter ]