Quotes About Authoritarianism

France was a long despotism tempered by epigrams.

the theme that runs powerfully through all of Orwell's writings, from his early work on Burmese Days through the late 1930s and then through the great essays, and into Animal Farm and 1984, is the abuse of power in the modern world by both the left and the right.

It's good for you to see your friends arrested. It hardens you. There's no place in our New Order for sentimentalists.

There's no doubt that the Chinese government is waging a full-fledged crackdown on Demosisto.

I hope I am not making the insulting error of pretending that democracies are as oppressive as dictatorships – such comparisons are the self-pitying and self-dramatising whines of spoilt Western children.

Large portraits of Mao on wooden boards several feet high stood at main street corners. Painted to make the old man look extremely youthful, healthy, and fat (a sign of well-being in China), these pictures provided a mocking contrast to the thin, pale-faced pedestrians walking listlessly below them.

Communism was a godless ideology: an idealized system of human government that could only be maintained by operating a ruthless police state

Earlier in the twentieth century some critics called fascism "capitalism with the gloves off," meaning that fascism was pure capitalism without democratic rights and organizations.

Any dictator would admire the obedience and uniformity of the U.S media.

The United States is a business-run society, much more so than comparable ones. Correspondingly, it has a very brutal labor history . . .

an age of unparalleled economic inequality, growing authoritarianism, and social Darwinism, with a left that has turned its back on the class struggle.

from 1960—remember the date—from 1960 to "the Soviet collapse in 1990, the numbers of political prisoners, torture victims, and executions of nonviolent political dissenters in Latin America vastly exceeded those in the Soviet Union and East European satellites.

My guess is that people haven't a clue how to get along . They need a structure , rules , and roles to play .

He is hated, because he teaches hate. We obey him because we must. He holds our minds in the hollow of his hand.

Yes, I am aware of the enticements required to obtain them," Kang replied with distaste. "I believe the Russians could teach the West a thing or two about capitalistic extortion.

Can you send in guards? asked Prue. To, you know, get things under control? We tried that, said the attaché. Only gets them more riled up. They start getting oppressed when you do that.

the patrollers were the law: white, crooked, and merciless. Drawn from the lowest and most vicious segment, too witless to even become overseers.

Hitler had argued that people would believe anything if it was repeated often enough and if disconfirming information was routinely denied, silenced, or disputed with yet more lies.

The public and private worlds are inseparably connected ... the tyrannies and servilities of one are the tyrannies and servilities of the other.

sedition enters the fortress and our troops rise in insurrection.

Manuel's harshest policies concerned the Jews of Portugal

he was told that he could do so only on condition that he "purify" Portugal by expelling the Jews

Timothy Snyder's On Tyranny was

The Achilles' heel of authoritarianism is that the leader by the very nature of his position is able to ignore the wisdom of anyone "below" him—that is, anyone who stands between him and the real world. This is what authority means: immunity from competence. —Philip Slater