Quotes About Totalitarianism

The possibility that popular participation and growing material affluence might serve as a barrier to the growth of the totalitarian state never occurred to Burckhardt. Instead, he concluded, "I know too much history to expect anything from the despotism of the masses except tyranny, which will be the end of history.

with the Bolshevik-dominated soviets around the country as their tool for enforcement—the first true totalitarian regime in history.

The 'gallows' are not only a symbol of death, but also a symbol of cruelty, terror and irreverence for life; the common denominator of primitive savagery, medieval fanaticism and modern totalitarianism.

Weak logic, inconsistencies and alienation from the people are common features of authoritarianism. The relentless attempts of totalitarian regimes to prevent free thought and new ideas and the persistent assertion of their own lightness bring on them an intellectual stasis which they project on to the nation at large. Intimidation and propaganda work in a duet of oppression, while the people, lapped in fear and distrust, learn to dissemble and to keep silent.

The worst crime committed by totalitarian mind-sets is that they force their citizens, including their victims, to become complicit in their crimes. Dancing with your jailer, participating in your own execution, that is an act of utmost brutality.

If you have total government it makes little difference whether you call it Communism, Fascism, Socialism, Caesarism or Pharaohism. It's all pretty much the same from the standpoint of the people who must live and suffer under it.

When fascism comes to America, it will not be in brown and black shirts. It will not be with jack-boots. It will be Nike sneakers and Smiley shirts...

Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda.

To declare the Cold War over, and declare democracy has won out over totalitarianism, is a measure of arrogance and wrong-headedness.

Corporate nationalism to me is a little bit like what would have happened if Hitler had won. It's scary stuff. It's totalitarianism in a different from, under a different flavour.

'1984' is not a wonder tale. Not only could it happen, but it has happened, but under different names.

Totalitarianism is feudalism in the twelfth century sense of the word.

If there is no word that means you don't have the concept. In North Korea they eliminate the words: depression, stress, dictatorship, human rights. You cannot think of those. That's why all the brainwashing was possible.

Human rights politics and law went some way to sensitizing humanity to the misery of visible indigence alongside the horrific repression of authoritarian and totalitarian states—but not to the crisis of national welfare, the stagnation of middle classes, and the endurance of global hierarchy.

they had come to a time when no one dared speak his mind, when fierce, growling dogs roamed everywhere, and when you had to watch your comrades torn to pieces after confessing to shocking crimes.

Consisten en sostener que, pese a su odio recíproco, hay entre el comunismo y el nazismo un denominador común: el colectivismo.

Él creía —era uno de sus grandes errores— que la distinción entre socialismo totalitario y democrático es una ilusión, algo provisional y aparente que, en la práctica, se iría borrando a favor del primero.

The Nazi regime had trapped the whole population of the country as accomplices, willing or not, in its own crimes, and its own insanity.

Comme, dans les partis politiques, il y a des démocrates qui admettent plusieurs partis, de même dans le domaine des opinions les gens larges reconnaissent une valeur aux opinions avec lesquelles ils se disent en désaccord. C'est avoir complètement perdu le sens même du vrai et du faux. D'autres, ayant pris position pour une opinion, ne consentent à examiner rien qui lui soit contraire. C'est la transposition de l'esprit totalitaire.

Rather like "Orwellian", the term "Kafkaesque" has come to be used, often enough by those who have not read a word of Kafka , to describe what are perceived as typically or even uniquely modern traumas: existential alienation, isolation and insecurity, the labyrinth of state bureaucracy, the corrupt or whimsical abuse of totalitarian power, the impenetrable tangle of legal systems, the knock on the door in the middle of the night….

With the film V for Vendetta, whose imagery borrows heavily from Nazi Germany's Third Reich and George Orwell's 1984, we come full circle. The corporate state in Vconducts mass surveillance on its citizens, helped along by closed-circuit televisions. Also, London is under yellow-coded curfew alerts, similar to the American government's color-coded Homeland Security Advisory System.

Obedience is the precondition to totalitarianism, and the precondition to obedience is fear.

If the old saying is true, that what one generation learns in school is the philosophy of the next, then the philosophy of the next generation will be totalitarianism.

they propound the first principle of totalitarianism: that the State is competent to do all things and is limited in what it actually does only by the will of those who control the State. It is clear that this view is in direct conflict with the Constitution which is an instrument, above all, for limiting the functions of government, and which is as binding today as when it was written.