Quotes About Authoritarianism

Some people think African states cannot be trusted with the cookie jar. But there are absolutely good NGOs who have this feeling of human solidarity and who also recognize that their work can only be supplementary to the government.

America is always a good target for a populist. In many countries, particularly authoritarian systems, if you want to get an extra bonus, you bash the Americans.

The seeds of totalitarian regimes are nurtured by misery and want.

People need security of the mind. Why do they want democracy? Because it can give them freedom and security in a balanced way.

Vladimir Putin wants to become the de facto head of an illiberal, xenophobic, hypernationalist trend in world politics.

After he saw what happened to Saddam Hussein, he (Gadhafi) did not want to be Saddam Hussein. He gave up his nuclear program.

After all, tyranny has no sense of humour. Too thin-skinned, too thoroughly full of its own self-importance

Well, we're fascistic and overmilitarized and being governed by reactionary undereducated proud-to-be-ignorant meatheads for one thing

Uhm, in our universe human civilization has descended into a pseudo-fascist hate-mongering anti-intellectual humorless inflexible lowest-common-denominator corporate fuck-everyone-over paradigm of systemic inequality and suffering and misery except for the chosen few.

At a 1937 conference of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union, Stalin's people applauded him for eleven consecutive minutes, fearing that the first to stop would be killed or sent to prison. Finally, one man stopped, the director of a paper factory. "To a man, everyone else stopped dead and sat down," writes Nobel Prize winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago. That same night the director of the paper factory was arrested and sent to prison for ten years.

This was a court of men; no women were present to witness the judgment of Shemyaza, seducer of all women.

a set of four behavioral warning signs that can help us know an authoritarian when we see one. We should worry when a politician 1) rejects, in words or action, the democratic rules of the game, 2) denies the legitimacy of opponents, 3) tolerates or encourages violence, or 4) indicates a willingness to curtail the civil liberties of opponents, including the media.

The nationalism that had been instilled in them for so many generations had produced a citizenry whose ego was so fragile that they refused to acknowledge the rest of the world.

There is not Communism or Marxism, but representative democracy and social justice in a well-planned economy.

We either go one direction, left, which would be socialism. Or right, which would be people trying to make the money themselves.

The meaning of peace is the absence of opposition to socialism.

I think one of the very frightening things about the regime of the National Socialists is that it made people happy.

Moammar Gaddafi, who has called himself the 'Guide of the First of September Great Revolution of the Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya,' should go down in history with the Emperor Bokassa and Idi Amin as a grotesque reminder of why people have the right to change their government.

Fact check: The examples of failed socialism that critics use are not socialist democracies but authoritarian states led by corrupt, ruthless, and paranoid dictators.

When societies go backwards and slide into authoritarianism, nationalism, and tribalism, machismo and sexism are also emboldened.

But you will understand by yourselves that the matter applies equally well to the organization of the officials of justice, of administrative officials, etc; these are likewise organized instruments of power in certain societies.

In contrast, fear societies are societies in which dissent is banned.

The reason societies with democratic governments are better places to live in than their alternatives isn't because of some goodness intrinsic to democracy, but because its hopeless inefficiency helps blunt the basic potential for evil.

Societies that depend on natural resources tend to have certain inherent problems. The limited concentration of wealth - whether from oil, coal, diamonds, or bauxite - often leads to corruption and authoritarianism.