Quotes About Authoritarianism

This new information world also provides a new set of tools and tactics that another generation of clercs can use to reach people who want simple language, powerful symbols, clear identities. There is no need, nowadays, to form a street movement in order to appeal to those of an authoritarian predisposition. You can construct one in an office

Because all authoritarianisms divide, polarize, and separate people into warring camps, the fight against them requires new coalitions. Together we can make old and misunderstood words like liberalism mean something again;

El autoritarismo es algo que atrae simplemente a las personas que no toleran la complejidad: no hay nada intrínseco «de izquierdas» o «de derechas» en ese instinto.

Los autoritarios necesitan a gente que promueva los disturbios o desencadene el golpe de Estado. Pero también necesitan a personas que sepan utilizar un sofisticado lenguaje jurídico, que sepan argumentar que violar la Constitución o distorsionar la ley es lo correcto.

autoritarismo es algo que atrae simplemente a las personas que no toleran la complejidad: no hay nada intrínseco «de izquierdas» o «de derechas» en ese instinto. Es meramente antipluralista; recela de las personas con ideas distintas, y es alérgico a los debates acalorados. Resulta irrelevante que quienes lo tienen deriven en última instancia su postura política del marxismo o del nacionalismo. Es una actitud mental, no un conjunto de ideas.

The speed with which this transformation took place was, in retrospect, nothing short of astonishing. In the Soviet Union itself, the evolution of a totalitarian state had taken two decades, and it had proceeded in fits and starts. The Bolsheviks did not begin with a blueprint.

Feliks Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Cheka—Lenin's secret police, the forerunner of the KGB— personally kept a little black notebook in which he scribbled down the names and addresses of random "enemies" he came across while doing his job.12

Arendt observed the attraction of authoritarianism to people who feel resentful or unsuccessful back in the 1940s, when she wrote that the worst kind of one-party state "invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.

El autoritarismo es algo que atrae simplemente a las personas que no toleran la complejidad: no hay nada intrínseco «de izquierdas» o «de derechas» en ese instinto. Es meramente antipluralista; recela de las personas con ideas distintas, y es alérgico a los debates acalorados. Resulta irrelevante que quienes lo tienen deriven en última instancia su postura política del marxismo o del nacionalismo. Es una actitud mental, no un conjunto de ideas.

Unity is an anomaly. Polarization is normal. Skepticism about liberal democracy is also normal. And the appeal of authoritarianism is eternal. Kalyvas is, among other things, the

That care included forced lessons, forced cutting, and no chance or choice to experience life.

his belief that the Orthodox Church is once again little more than a corrupt government asset.

The chance to profit from corruption is why many authoritarian leaders seize and cling to power.

We believe that this is not right for a democracy to make revolutions the beacon of promoting democracy.

They make revolutionary propaganda because they know the privileged class can never be overturned peacefully.

Musharraf's government has a civilian face - there are still elections and assemblies - and he has come to believe his own propaganda that he really is a democrat.

If you look back at history, most important PR and propaganda was invented by the Communist Party.

The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.

Getting out to protest, this is something real and, I would say, something patriotic. Part of the new authoritarianism is to get people to prefer fiction and inaction to reality and action.

power and alliance for them, slavery and conquest over us.

for if this shall be, and they ratify your words, I no longer know this Athens as free.

Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry

Democracy is also a single ideology, and, like all such templates, it has its limits. what works in a legislature might not work in a corporation

In an almost unthinkable reversal of a global pattern, almost every Arab country today is less free than it was forty years ago. There are few places in the world about which one can say that.