Quotes About Totalitarianism

Gay marriage is a divisive issue in France, where Fillon has vowed to block adoption by same-sex couples. The battle against Islamism also remains a rallying cry; Fillon's campaign manifesto is called 'Conquering Islamic Totalitarianism'.

Large swathes of people losing faith in democracy is a dangerous thing. Conflict, desperation, totalitarianism are the products of that loss of faith.

Liberalism will beat totalitarianism by killing it softly, not by mimicking it.

should Americans ever find themselves faced with an incorrigible government of totalitarian oppression, a government that has abandoned the very principles this nation was founded upon and that reconstituted a slavery like that of the past, then the people have the natural, inalienable right to change the government as they see fit, and the spirit of this amendment clearly applies.

In this, as in so much else, the Communists and the Nazis are of the same opinion.

Having come from a totalitarian country, the Soviet Union, and having seen the hardships that my family endured--both while there and trying to leave--I certainly am particularly sensitive to the stifling of individual liberties.

Fascist and Nazi totalitarianism was made possible by the methodical transformation of passive citizens into ardent followers, uncomplaining patriots, willing executioners, and, finally, cannon fodder.

Mussolini, Stalin, and Hitler did not just invent their personae; they literally built the organizations of their respective dictatorships. Each system was inseparable from its Führer, or Duce. Inverted totalitarianism follows an entirely different course: the leader is not the architect of the system but its product.

Next time round Hitler will be a machine.

every totalitarian regime forms a type of human being on whom it relies for its stability. The shaping of the New Man is the regime's explicit project, but its product is not so much a vessel for the regime's ideology as it is a person best equipped to survive in a given society. The regime, in turn, comes to depend on this newly shaped type of person for its continued survival.

What distinguishes a totalitarian ideology is its utterly insular quality. It purports to explain the entire world and everything in it.

If the Nazi Holocaust exterminated the Other, the Soviet terror was suicidal.

Fascism, properly understood, is not a phenomenon of the right at all. Instead, it is, and always has been, a phenomenon of the left. This fact – an inconvenient truth if there ever was one – is obscured in our time by the equally mistaken belief that fascism and communism are opposites. In reality, they are closely related, historical competitors for the same constituents.

Fascism and communism were and are religions of the state.

Marx's projected emancipating socialist Kingdom of Freedom - freedom not only from coercion but from any sort of necessity- turned out to be totalitarian and among the most violently oppressive regimes ever.

The worst crime committed by totalitarian mind-sets is that they force their citizens, including their victims, to become complicit in their crimes.

Il peggior crimine di un regime totalitario è costringere i cittadini, incluse le vittime, a diventare suoi complici.

What Nabokov captured was the texture of life in a totalitarian society, where you are completely alone in an illusory world full of false promises, where you can no longer differentiate between your savior and your executioner.

We were all victims of the arbitrary nature of a totalitarian regime that constantly intruded into the most private corners of our lives and imposed its relentless fictions on us. Was this rule the rule of Islam? What memories were we creating for our children? This constant assault, this persistent lack of kindness, was what frightened me most.

The first is the decline of communism (together with intrusive socialism). For reasons we have seen, market economies can generate wealth prodigiously while totalitarian planned economies impose scarcity, stagnation, and often famine.

three-quarters of all the deaths from all 141 democidal regimes were committed by just four governments, which Rummel calls the dekamegamurderers: the Soviet Union with 62 million, the People's Republic of China with 35 million, Nazi Germany with 21 million, and 1928–49 nationalist China with 10 million.

Solzhenitsyn recounted a party conference in Moscow that ended with a tribute to Stalin. Everyone stood and clapped wildly for three minutes, then four, then five . . . and then no one dared to be the first to stop. After eleven minutes of increasingly stinging palms, a factory director on the platform finally sat down, followed by the rest of the grateful assembly. He was arrested that evening and sent to the gulag for ten years.278

For reasons we have seen, market economies can generate wealth prodigiously while totalitarian planned economies impose scarcity, stagnation, and often famine.

Of the seventy million people who died in major 20th-century famines, 80 percent were victims of Communist regimes