Quotes About Totalitarianism

Meanwhile, countries that had actually undergone the dreamed-of socialist revolution— North Korea, Cuba, and East Germany, for example—suffered from sputtering economies and totalitarian regimes. To people who had embraced so-called Marxist dogma during their entire careers, the juxtaposition of these two realities was both puzzling and disturbing.

Churchill knew instinctively what was wrong with communism—that it repressed liberty; that it replaced individual discretion with state control; that it entailed the curtailment of democracy, and therefore that it was tyrannous.

This is the house of freedom and it should constantly remind us how subtle and sensitive the barrier is between freedom and its opposite, totalitarianism."3

Where they burn books they will in the end burn people too

Dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen.

Because if you lived, as I did, several years under Nazi totalitarianism, and then 20 years in communist totalitarianism, you would certainly realize how precious freedom is, and how easy it is to lose your freedom.

Having lived through the transition from totalitarianism, I am acutely mindful of the need to never take for granted the basic freedoms of thought, expression and belief that democracy brings.

?emu onda Komesarijat naroda za sudstvo? - pitao je Steinberg Staljina. Zvat ?emo ga onda komesarijat naroda za društveno istrebljenje, sve ?e biti jasnije.

Prema Landeru, pitanje Crvenog terora bilo je riješeno za jedan dan. ?ekisti Piatigorska odlu?iše pogubiti 300 osoba za jedan dan. Oni su definisali kvote za grad i za svaku okolnu varoš, i naredili orgaizacijama Partije da sro?e liste za egzekucije. U Kislovodsku, u nedostatku drugih ideja, boljševici su odlu?ili ubiti ljude koji su bili u bolnici.

La actual preocupación casi histérica por la seguridad es en el mejor de los casos un derroche de recursos y un obstáculo para el espíritu humano, y en el peor de los casos una invitación al totalitarismo. Se necesita con urgencia educación pública.

There is a peculiar neo-Stalinist mode of thought that is required to support all this, and it can thrive only in a restrictive setting, behind closed doors, without due process. In our society, only universities have created that—so far. The notion that these institutions are liberal is a cruel joke. They are fascist to the core, I'm telling you.

Hitler's dictatorship rested on the constitutional foundation of a single law, the Enabling Law.

Hitler and Mussolini even went so far as to persecute Esperanto speakers.

We will enter into a new phase in which the Leviathan, so to speak, will become the body formed to make possible the incarnation and the manifestation of a principle and a higher order: with that, the collectivistic and irrational aspect of the principle of totalitarianism and authority will be surpassed and will again implement a type of truly spiritual and traditional hierarchical organization.

Baathism in Iraq equals Nazism in Germany.

If modern science made possible weapons of unprecedented destructiveness like the machine gun and the bomber, modern politics created a state of unprecedented power, for which a new word, totalitarianism, had to be coined.

Non c'è dittatura senza fedeltà, la fedeltà è la solida roccia sulla quale si erige lo Stato totalitario, che senza di essa affonderebbe nella sabbia; per la democrazia è necessaria invece una certa mancanza di fedeltà, una attitudine più svolazzante, più irresoluta, più fantasiosa.

Only the freedom of mind can prevent the state from becoming totalitarian and from issuing totalitarian demands.

By virtue of the way it has organized its technological base, contemporary industrial society tends to be totalitarian. For totalitarian is not only a terroristic political coordination of society, but also a non-terroristic economic-technical coordination which operates through the manipulation of needs by vested interests.

Technology serves to institute new, more effective, and more pleasant forms of social control and social cohesion. The totalitarian tendency of these controls seems to assert itself in still another sense—by spreading to the less developed and even to the pre-industrial areas of the world, and by creating similarities in the development of capitalism and communism.

Seventy years ago this November, Vladimir Lenin created the modern totalitarian state, transforming simpler forms of tyranny into history's most sophisticated apparatus of rule by terror.

In 1984, George Orwell wrote of a world where the only colour to be found was in the propaganda posters. Such is the case in North Korea. Images of Kim Il-sung are depicted in vivid colours. Rays of yellow and orange emanate from his face: he is the sun.

In a totalitarian state like North Korea, a group of neighbors gathering once a week to watch the latest episode of a forbidden soap opera is committing a political act, and forming, with the market traders who deliver them this treasure, a rudimentary civil society.

If Germany, thanks to Hitler and his successors, were to enslave the European nations and destroy most of the treasures of their past, future historians would certainly pronounce that she had civilized Europe.