Quotes About Control

The essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy, is to make functionaries and mere cogs in the administrative machinery out of men, and thus to dehumanize them.

To be sure, totalitarian dictators do not consciously embark upon the road to insanity. The

A fundamental difference between modern dictatorships and all other tyrannies of the past is that terror is no longer used as a means to exterminate and frighten opponents, but as an instrument to rule masses of people who are perfectly obedient. Terror as we know it today strikes without any preliminary provocation, its victims are innocent even from the point of view of the persecutor.

The organization of the entire texture of life according to an ideology can be fully carried out only under a totalitarian regime.

A valid and comparatively permanent appointment would indeed presuppose the existence of a clique whose members would share the Leader's monopoly of knowledge of what is going on, which the Leader must avoid by all means.

A fundamental difference between modern dictatorships and all other tyrannies of the past is that terror is no longer used as a means to exterminate and frighten opponents, but as an instrument to rule masses of people who are perfectly obedient.

Totalitaire overheersing is gericht op de vernietiging van de vrijheid, meer nog, op de eliminatie van de spontaniteit in het algemeen, en geenszins op de beperking, hoe tiranniek ook van de vrijheid. Technisch gesproken blijkt de afwezigheid van enig gezag of hiërarchie in het totalitaire systeem uit het feit dat er tussen de hoogste macht (de Führer) en de onderdanen geen tussenliggende niveaus zijn die elk hun aangepaste deel hebben in het gezag en de gehoorzaamheid.

Wanneer het totalitarisme aan de macht is, gebruikt het de staat als uiterlijke façade om het land in de niet-totalitaire wereld te representeren.[...]Ze moet de schijn van normaliteit en gezond verstand ophouden tegenover de normale buitenwereld.

both Hitler and Stalin were masters of detail and devoted themselves in the early stages of their careers almost entirely to questions of personnel, so that after a few years hardly any man of importance remained who did not owe his position to them.86

Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless we have a tyranny without a tyrant.

he gains as much power by the system of mutual promises as he loses by his consent to a monopoly of power in the ruler

fundamental difference between modern dictatorships and all other tyrannies of the past is that terror is no longer used as a means to exterminate and frighten opponents, but as an instrument to rule masses of people who are perfectly obedient.

Only where great masses are superfluous or can be spared without disastrous results of depopulation is totalitarian rule, as distinguished from a totalitarian movement, at all possible.

order to establish a totalitarian regime, terror must be presented as an instrument for carrying out a specific ideology; and that ideology must have won the adherence of many, and even a majority, before terror can be stabilized.

Decisive in our context is that totalitarian government is different from dictatorships and tyrannies; the ability to distinguish between them is by no means an academic issue which could be safely left to the "theoreticians," for total domination is the only form of government with which coexistence is not possible.

The task of the totalitarian police is not to discover crimes, but to be on hand when the government decides to arrest a certain category of the population.

The operation of the secret police, on the contrary, miraculously sees to it that the victim never existed at all.

while we know the operation and the specific function of the totalitarian secret police, we do not know how well or to what an extent the 'secret' of this secret society corresponds to the secret desires and the secret complicities of the masses in our time.

the Stalin regime was ruthlessly consistent: all facts that did not agree, or were likely to disagree, with the official fiction—data on crop-yields, criminality, true incidences of "counter-revolutionary" activities as distinguished from the later conspiracy fictions—were treated as non-facts.

executive branch of this particular government was not the party but the police, whose "operational activities were not regulated through party channels";

Few men are true masters over their women. In truth, I would eye with suspicion any woman who acts as if that is the truth. Either she lies, or she is so dull-witted or weak-spirited that she will make you a tedious wife.

Beware of fascist feminism.

Defining virginity means directly affecting the lives of nearly all women, and many men as well. Despite what some people appear to think, defining virginity is not merely a philosophical exercise. It is an exercise in controlling how people behave, feel, and think, and in some cases, whether they live or die.

While the "women just want to have consequence-free sex" anti-contraceptive argument is often trotted out by latter-day social conservatives, such a view is a cruel and misogynist oversimplification. A more realistic assessment of the struggle for effective contraception would be to see it as the struggle to achieve some level of control over the single most dangerous, resource-intensive, and biologically crucial activity in which human beings regularly engage.