Quotes About Authoritarianism

The essential notion of a capitalist society ... is voluntary cooperation, voluntary exchange. The essential notion of a socialist society is force.

The ultimate test of a society's freedom is not how it treats its good, obedient, compliant citizens; it's how it treats its dissidents.

No state or society can claim to have established human rights once and for all.

Whenever Mosley was heckled at one of his rallies, he stopped speaking and searchlights focused on the heckler as jackbooted men beat him and then threw him out of the hall.

From the colonial era, the major legacy Europe left to Africa was not democracy as it is practiced today in countries like England, France, and Belgium; it was authoritarian rule and plunder.

The Empire does what is necessary," the subofficer observed in a phlegmatic manner which would have gratified his superiors.

This way and stop looking so positive: optimism doesn't fit a prisoner's profile. Poe obediently lowered his head and adopted as morose an expression as possible.

I want to take their money and let them build their ship and get off my land. That's all I want." "Good to know," said a voice above her head. Elliot and Dee looked up, and there, shadowed against the light from the swinging sun-lamps, stood Kai.

Though actually kids did not need liberating except from normative training. So it was an anti-colonial project of a sort to defend children from the state.

The implication of nonconformity is intolerable to Communists.

We go off the meds and elect Richard Nixon, the Nurse Ratched of the American political psych ward.

Our ideology is intolerant...and peremptorily demands...the complete transformation of public life to its ideas.

Every law is an evil, for every law is an infraction of liberty.

Love permits and even respects dissent: Authoritarianism does not. Everybody should learn the difference.

Some of the same rhetoric used by the law-and-order crowd has been used by authoritarian states over and over again.

That's another step forward in creating a nation of sheep in a totalitarian state, saying, "Yes sir, yes sir! Is that what you want? Do it to me again!" By the time they graduate, kids won't even know they have rights. They'll be little stooges for a fascist state.

The courage of the authoritarian character is essentially a courage to suffer what fate or its personal representative or "leader" may have destined him for. To suffer without complaining is his highest virtue—not the courage of trying to end suffering or at least to diminish it. Not to change fate, but to submit to it, is the heroism of the authoritarian character.

The authoritarian character worships the past. What has been, will eternally be. To wish or to work for something that has not yet been before is crime or madness. The miracle of creation—and creation is always a miracle—is outside of his range of emotional experience.

The concept of original sin, which weighs upon all future generations, is characteristic of the authoritarian experience. Moral like any other kind of human failure becomes a fate which man can never escape. Whoever has once sinned is chained eternally to his sin with iron shackles, Man's own doing becomes the power that rules over him and never lets him free. The consequences of guilt can be softened by atonement, but atonement can never do away with the guilt.

Simultaneous love for authority and the hatred against those who are powerless are typical of the authoritarian character

But Hitler's government was neither civil nor coherent, and the nation lurched from one inexplicable moment to another.

Dodd read dispatch after dispatch in which Messersmith described Germany's rapid descent from democratic republic to brutal dictatorship. Messersmith spared no detail—his tendency to write long had early on saddled him with the nickname "Forty-Page George.

The priest was good but dull. The officers were not good but dull. The King was good but dull. The wine was bad but not dull.

To Hitler, personal and ideological loyalty was more important than professional aptitude and performance.