Quotes About Totalitarianism

Of the seventy million people who died in major 20th-century famines, 80 percent were victims of Communist regimes' forced collectivization, punitive confiscation, and totalitarian central planning.

the Blank Slate had, and has, a dark side. The vacuum that it posited in human nature was eagerly filled by totalitarian regimes, and it did nothing to prevent their genocides. It perverts education, childrearing, and the arts into forms of social engineering. It torments mothers who work outside the home and parents whose children did not turn out as they would have liked. It threatens to outlaw biomedical research that could alleviate human suffering.

el orden que aspiramos a imponer en el mundo se puede solidificar a raíz de nuestros cándidos empeños por dejar de sopesar todo lo desconocido. Cuando estos empeños llegan demasiado lejos, acecha el totalitarismo, impulsado por el deseo de ejercer un control completo cuando no es posible ni siquiera a nivel teórico.

What is going to save you? The totalitarian says, in essence, "You must rely on faith in what you already know." But that is not what saves. What saves is the willingness to learn from what you don't know. That is faith in the possibility of human transformation. That is faith in the sacrifice of the current self for the self that could be. The totalitarian denies the necessity for the individual to take ultimate responsibility for Being.

deceitful, inauthentic individual existence is the precursor to social totalitarianism.

Viktor Frankl, the psychiatrist and Nazi concentration camp survivor who wrote the classic Man's Search for Meaning, drew a similar social-psychological conclusion: deceitful, inauthentic individual existence is the precursor to social totalitarianism.

The soul willing to transform, as deeply as necessary, is the most effective enemy of the demonic serpents of ideology and totalitarianism,

The soul willing to transform, as deeply as necessary, is the most effective enemy of the demonic serpents of ideology and totalitarianism, in their personal and social forms.

The totalitarian says, in essence, "You must rely on faith in what you already know." But that is not what saves. What saves is the willingness to learn from what you don't know. That is faith in the possibility of human transformation. That is faith in the sacrifice of the current self for the self that could be.

A totalitarian never asks, "What if my current ambition is in error?" He treats it, instead, as the Absolute. It becomes his God, for all intents and purposes. It constitutes his highest value. It regulates his emotions and motivational states, and determines his thoughts. All people serve their ambition. In that matter, there are no atheists. There are only people who know, and don't know, what God they serve.

What has emerged from behind its corpse, however—and this is an issue of central importance—is something even more dead; something that was never alive, even in the past: nihilism, as well as an equally dangerous susceptibility to new, totalizing, utopian ideas. It was in the aftermath of God's death that the great collective horrors of Communism and Fascism sprang forth (as both Dostoevsky and Nietzsche predicted they would).

But most importantly, it means denial of the necessity for courageous individual confrontation with Being. What is going to save you? The totalitarian says, in essence, "You must rely on faith in what you already know." But that is not what saves. What saves is the willingness to learn from what you don't know. That is faith in the possibility of human transformation. That is faith in the sacrifice of the current self for the self that could be.

It was from this that I drew my fundamental moral conclusions. Aim up. Pay attention. Fix what you can fix. Don't be arrogant in your knowledge. Strive for humility, because totalitarian pride manifests itself in intolerance, oppression

An ideological theory explains everything: all the past, all the present, and all the future. This means that an ideologue can consider him or herself in possession of the complete truth (something forbidden to the self-consistent fundamentalist). There is no claim more totalitarian and no situation in which the worst excesses of pride are more likely to manifest themselves (and not only pride, but then deceit, once the ideology has failed to explain the world or predict its future).

The paintings were not there because Jordan had any totalitarian sympathies, but because he wanted to remind himself of something he knew he and everyone would rather forget: that over a hundred million people were murdered in the name of utopia.

And, above all, don't lie. Don't lie about anything, ever. Lying leads to Hell. It was the great and the small lies of the Nazi and Communist states that produced the deaths of millions of people.

Lying leads to Hell. It was the great and the small lies of the Nazi and Communist states that produced the deaths of millions of people.

This left him with a single remaining escape from nihilism and totalitarianism: the emergence of the individual strong enough to create his own values, project them onto valueless reality, and then abide by them.

Individuals who take this route, this alternative to nihilism and totalitarianism, must therefore produce their own cosmology of values.

I'm against any religion, and Communism and Nazism - they're both equally religions. They're just replacement gods.

During the entire communist era, communist ideology was imposed on children. That was Bolshevism.

As every advance of Power is useful for war, so war is useful for the advance of power; war is like a sheep-dog harrying the laggard Powers to catch up their smarter fellows in the totalitarian race.

But as we've seen throughout history, utopian philosophies are impossible to impose and totalitarianism is often the result

We don't let them have ideas. Why would we let them have guns?