Quotes About Authoritarianism

We might be tempted to think that our democratic heritage automatically protects us from such threats. This is a misguided reflex.

Chinese authorities demonstrated during the climate-related civil war that began in Sudan in 2003 that they would support mass murderers when doing so seemed to serve their investments. In

certain kinds of polities, communist party-states such as the Soviet Union, the People's Republic of China, and Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, are capable, in times of peace, of killing large numbers of their own citizens as a matter of deliberate policy.

Czechoslovakia spoke of "normalization," which nicely caught the spirit of the moment. What was, was normal. To say otherwise in Brezhnev's Soviet Union was to be condemned to an insane asylum.

The key to this translation of ideology to politics in both cases was an effective appeal to human experience at the crucial time.

Right now, we have no possibility of politics because we have a one-party state.

The universal is what the ruling order doesn't have, not what it does have. In this way, it is always on the side of those fighting on behalf of freedom and equality because they are what is missing, not what is manifested.

I think Dianne Feinstein may be the most Orwellian political official in Washington. It is hard to imagine having a government more secretive than the United States.

I have never intimidated the masses... I only intimidate corrupt officials.

On the face of it, China has won the Olympics. But it is not China that has won, but the Communist party. The Chinese people have lost.

While the United States is closing doors, Canada is opening them. While U.S. President Donald Trump is slouching toward authoritarianism, Canada is safeguarding democracy.

I don't think that military-style information operations is conducive for any democratic process.

I was stopped in the dense Soviet wood by bandits who called themselves my judges.

New World Order," Langdon repeated, "based on scientific enlightenment. They called it their Luciferian Doctrine.

lunatics will rise to power again and again on tidal waves of aggressive nationalism and intolerance, even in places where it seems utterly incomprehensible.

Death threats. Gag laws. Book banning. Secret informants. Voter suppression and election intimidation. Vows to imprison political opponents.

And of all the plagues with which mankind are cursed, Ecclesiastic tyranny's the worst.

A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. Authoritarian institutions and marketers have always known this fact.

But politicians quickly learned to pacify the liberals by passing laws and regulations that, to pacify the conservatives, would not be enforced.

That was the horror of the Purge—that acting as a Communist, Stalin had acted rightly. In that fact lay the evidence that Communism is absolutely evil.

TALIBAN-ESQUE Any behavior that imposes the beliefs of one person on everyone else. Conversations with the Taliban-esque are impossible. They aren't even conversations. WIth them, it's my way or no way.

The fickle disposition of the multitude almost reduces those who have experience of it to despair; for it is governed solely by emotions, and not by reason.

Democracy means perfect equality of opportunity, especially in education; not the rotation of every Tom, Dick and Harry in public office.

To Buckley, she embodied the worst of what in subsequent decades would be called political correctness: the mindless application to every issue of a platitudinous egalitarianism whose practical effect invariably is to expand the reach of totalitarianism.