Quotes About Authoritarianism

Do not be seduced by feelings that a dictatorship of the proletariat is temporarily needed

The lack of political freedom in much of the Middle East combined with the failure of most countries in the region to provide rising living standards and good jobs for young people made radical ideology attractive, and as long as those conditions persisted, terror groups would find support.

The naked public square cannot remain naked, the direction is toward the state-as-church, toward totalitarianism."6

Government is inherently incompetent, and no matter what task it is assigned, it will do it in the most expensive and inefficient way possible.

Perhaps America will one day go fascist democratically, by popular vote.

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.

At the moment of a revolution there is no question of setting up a democracy like that in America. If they accuse me of dictatorship, I accept. I am creating a nation. Liberty must be suppressed until the end of the war in Algeriauntil the nation becomes homogeneous.

The road to totalitarian domination leads through many intermediate stages for which we can find numerous analogies and precedents.

No cause is left but the most ancient of all, the one, in fact, that from the beginning of our history has determined the very existence of politics, the cause of freedom versus tyranny.

Cultures that develop around the notion of an authoritarian Father God inevitably oppress those who do not fit the image of the all-powerful, adult, human male: children, women, homosexuals, and the nonhuman communities of animal, plant, and mineral life with which we live and share the planet.

Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisoned by the enemy, don't we consider it his duty to escape? The moneylenders, the knownothings, the authoritarians have us all in prison; if we value the freedom of the mind and soul, if we're partisans of liberty, then it's our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can.

Most management advice for the last twenty-five years has focused on issues like empathy and compassion. Advice books encourage building teamwork through kindness and understanding. There's been very little written about scaring the pants off employees to improve results. But as Richard Nixon said, "People react to fear, not love—they don't teach that in Sunday School, but it's true.

Science fictions are suppressed only when likely to contribute more knowledge and freedom than the defensive orthodoxies they challenge.

Dictators and oppressors should continue to fear me because I will be here for a long time.

Most arguments with teenagers are setups. Your darling, simply stated, is manipulating you.

Pacifism, the preaching of peace in the abstract, is one of the means of duping the working class.

When we are victorious on a world scale I think we shall use gold for the purpose of building public lavatories in the streets of some of the largest cities of the world.

The functionaries of our political organizations and trade unions are corrupted -- or rather tend to be corrupted -- by the conditions of capitalism and betray a tendency to become bureaucrats, i.e., privileged persons divorced from the people and standing above the people.

What else do we know about a person when we know his or her score on the F scale? Research utilizing the F scale suggests people who are high on authoritarianism do not simply dislike Jews or dislike blacks, but, rather, show a consistently high degree of prejudice against all minority groups (including, recent studies indicate, AIDS patients). Any selection of a particular hate target is guided by convenience and social convention.

The problem of response set is particularly relevant to the F scale because all of the items were worded in the same direction. In other words, all items were worded so that agreement indicated a high (or prejudiced, fascist, authoritarianism) score. As a result, it was easy for researchers to demonstrate that the scale did not measure ideological content but only a tendency to agree—with anything.

Unlike in the U.K. or France or America, we've never used water cannon for mass riots dispersal.

I'm afraid that reason will triumph and that the world will become a place where anyone who doesn't fit that will become unnecessary.

Foreign leaders across the world have treated the coronavirus as an opportunity for unprecedented power grabs. China and South Korea track their citizens digitally. Israel suspended some courts. Hungary's executive seized emergency authorities. Elections were delayed.

The one indisputable reality of dictatorship is that dissent, insult, and malevolent language do not go unpunished if it is allowed at all.