Quotes About Authoritarianism

(The AMA is) "just another mean trust."

With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power.

I am particularly horrified by the use of propaganda and the manipulation of the truth and the revision of history.

Truth is always the enemy of power. And power the enemy of truth.

The moral consequences of totalitarian propaganda...are destructive of all morals because they undermind one of the foundations of all morals: the sense of and respect for truth.

I was a human rights defender, and I based my criticisms of the state on legal grounds. But authoritarian governments are not fond of shades of gray; they cannot tolerate any criticism at all

So much can be explained by the habitual clumsiness of totalitarian panic.

There is one, and only one, thing in modern society more hideous than crime namely, repressive justice.

It Can't Happen Here.

Totalitarian rule marks the sharpest contrast imaginable with political rule, and ideological thinking is an explicit and direct challenge to political thinking.

A just fear of an imminent danger, though there be no blow given, is a lawful cause of war.

Despite the fact that he fathered ten children, Dickens, the write, never gave up his position as a child. He identified with children and with the child-like - those who are not in power and who suffer under the fickle and often sadistic demands of those who are.

Why do economists fall in love with authoritarian governments?

The workers love Khrushchev very much. He hasn't got an enemy in the entire country. Quite a few under it.

It was not often that Flay approved of happiness in others. He saw in happiness the seeds of independence, and in independence the seeds of revolt.

Dinner? You want to eat with me?' 'That's right, a Jew and queer, eh? The SS would love that, wouldn't they? Perhaps we can plot an assassination attempt.

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

Only the gods tell him what to do, and you should beware of men who take their orders from the gods.

It is curious that Mill makes very little mention of the police as a danger to liberty. In our day they are its worst enemy...

People feel that they're being required to meet all sorts of regulations and rules and requirements in their areas of work and MPs are not imposing those sort of restrictions on themselves.

I use emotion for the many and reserve reason for the few.

But, actually, so many of the clerics that I've met, particularly the Church of England clerics, are people of such extraordinary smugness and arrogance and conceitedness who are extraordinarily presumptuous about the significance of their position in society.

Silence on the part of public officials at the national level only serves to empower Islamophobes.

Inborn human desires are a nuisance to those with utopian and totalitarian visions, which often amount to the same thing.