Quotes About Totalitarianism

The secret police announced that two men were shot for "resisting arrest" yesterday. One of them, it is stated, was trying to induce some German workers to lay down their tools in an important armament factory. Himmler now has power to shoot anyone he likes without trial.

Woof," the dogman Nazi said.

Inverted totalitarianism, unlike classical totalitarianism, does not revolve around a demagogue or charismatic leader. It finds expression in the anonymity of the Corporate State. It purports to cherish democracy, patriotism, and the Constitution while manipulating internal levers.

Totalitarian power thrives when it alienates people from basic information about themselves. When European slavers abducted people from Africa, they essentially took away their history as well.

Es una defensa clásica en los sistemas totalitarios: todos los verdugos afirman estar aterrorizados. Tal vez en parte sea cierto. El torturador puede tener miedo, pero tiene elección. El prisionero sólo tiene miedo

Kovaly experienced the two supreme horrors of what Hannah Arendt called this terrible century.

This was but a prelude; where books are burnt human-beings will be burnt in the end

similarities between Francoism and Stalinism.)

clear parallel between Francoist judicial practice and that of the Nazis – in that both, unlike the Soviet case, overturned previous liberal jurisprudence/practice.

like Stalin, Franco pursued an intransigent political idea of "purifying" state and domestic order with extreme levels of brutality and coercion.

quality demands a democracy of producers and consumers, freedom of criticism and initiative – conditions incompatible with a totalitarian regime of fear, lies and flattery.

The authority of the Führer is not limited by checks and controls, by special autonomous bodies or individual rights, but it is free and independent, all-inclusive and unlimited," said Ernst Huber, an official party spokesman, in 1933.

In a certain limited sense Chinese Communism is more egalitarian than the Soviet variety; not, however, because it is less totalitarian, but because it is more so.

Marxism under Stalin cannot be defined by any collection of statements, ideas, or concepts: it was not a question of propositions as such but of the fact that there existed an all-powerful authority competent to declare at any given moment what Marxism was and what it was not.

The great secret of centralized power was secrecy itself. That holds of all totalitarian states down to our own day.

To write is a relief from life's problems. It is a way in which you revenge yourself. In art, the writer achieves utopia. But any attempt to achieve social utopia is bound to catastrophe. If you want a society of saints, the result is hell, repression, totalitarianism, and persecution.

The Cuban people still live in constant fear of a brutal totalitarian regime that has demonstrated time and again its utter disregard for basic human dignity. The fight for a free Cuba has gone on for far too long.

When I explain to people what was the situation in North Korea, they think, how can such a country exist? They know North Korea is bad in some vague way, not clearly. But when we explain it, they then wonder how can a whole country be modern-day slaves?

The oppression is like nothing imaginable - I literally believed that Kim Jong-il could read my mind.

I've always been interested in those Orwellian dystopian novels, like 'Fahrenheit 451,' 'Brave New World,' and obviously Orwell's '1984.'

Hitler responded by calling Mussolini's movement "Kosher fascism.")

I was interested by the idea that artists working in a totalitarian dictatorship or tsarist autocracy are secretly and slightly shamefully envied by artists who work in freedom. They have the gratification of intense interest: the authorities want to put them in jail, while there are younger readers for whom what they write is pure oxygen.

Allra mest tyckte jag om att få var svinaktig med Hitler og Stalin.

We often like to think of World War II as a triumph of freedom over totalitarianism. We conveniently forget that the Soviet Union was also one of the winners.