Quotes About Totalitarianism

What we call National-Socialism is the poisonous perversion of ideas which have a long history in German intellectual life.

Liberalism is totalitarianism with a human face.

All of North Korea is a jail.

Everything in North Korea was about the leader, all the books, music and TV.

Orwell conjures up an Orwellian world

The trouble when people stop believing in God is not that they thereafter believe in nothing; it is that they thereafter believe in anything. In this century, 'anything' has included Hitler, Stalin and Mao, authors of the great genocidal madnesses of our time.

You can have the most advanced and efflorescent cultures. Get your politics wrong, however, and everything stands to be swept away. This is not ancient history. This is Germany 1933.

One might say that romance with revolution died with Solzhenitsyn. The line from Bastille to the gulag is not straight, but the connection is unmistakable. Modern totalitarianism has its roots in 1789. 'The spirit of the French Revolution has always been present in the social life of our country,' said Gorbachev during his visit to France last week. Few attempts at ingratiation have been more true or more damning.

The naked public square cannot remain naked, the direction is toward the state-as-church, toward totalitarianism."6

During the twentieth century, communist governments killed some 100 million of their own people in peacetime, either by repression or by famine.

Totalitarianism is never content to rule by external means, namely, through the state and a machinery of violence; thanks to its peculiar ideology and the role assigned to it in this apparatus of coercion, totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within.

The totalitarian attempt at global conquest and total domination has been the destructive way out of all impasses. Its victory may coincide with the destruction of humanity; wherever it has ruled, it has begun to destroy the essence of man.

The road to totalitarian domination leads through many intermediate stages for which we can find numerous analogies and precedents.

Totalitarianism strives not toward despotic rule over men, but toward a system in which men are superfluous. Total power can be achieved and safeguarded only in a world of conditioned reflexes, of marionettes.

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.

One of the greatest advantages of the totalitarian elites of the twenties and thirties was to turn any statement of fact into a question of motive.

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

So while the totalitarian state may include a TV camera in every room, I doubt that the camera will work.

Fascism is capitalism in decay.

He said the reason we studied history was to find out why things were the way they were, how we got here. He said you could do anything you wanted to people who didn't know their history. That was the way a totalitarian system worked.

thinking about what Mr. Delgado had said in our last class. He said the reason we studied history was to find out why things were the way they were, how we got here. He said you could do anything you wanted to people who didn't know their history. That was the way a totalitarian system worked. Who

Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism as I understand it.

I need not point out that this affair represents an appalling setback," he wrote on New Year's Eve 1952. He pointed out that, in Poland and elsewhere in the Soviet orbit, the "perfection of totalitarian police state techniques is approaching '1984' efficiency to a degree where 'resistance' can probably exist only in the minds of the enslaved peoples.

a democratic nation can limp along even when its chief of state is widely understood to be a lazy, bumbling simpleton. Fallible leadership is the only kind of leadership any nation ever has. Since totalitarians cannot afford to admit this, their domains start and end in fantasy