Quotes About Totalitarianism

The government spying on people doesn't literally make programmers write worse code. It just leads eventually to a world in which bad ideas will win. And because this is so important to hackers, they're especially sensitive to it. They can sense totalitarianism approaching from a distance, as animals can sense an approaching thunderstorm.

Such is the totalitarian task of communism. Indeed, the textbook definition of totalitarianism, which I have scribbled on the chalkboard every fall semester at Grove City College since 1997, is to fundamentally transform—specifically, to seek to fundamentally transform human nature via some form of political-ideological-cultural upheaval.

An airport is an obstacle course, and because of that it can sour you on the whole notion of travel. By degrees, over the years, the airport experience has become an extreme example of a totalitarian regime at work, making you small and suspect, depriving you of control. Such is the clumsy questioning of motives

In all cases communism brought vicious dictatorships and widespread human rights abuses.

So many people who wanted no part of all this. That's what's new. There used to be the option of opting out. But now that's over. Completion is the end. We're closing the circle around everyone—it's a totalitarian nightmare.

something about how all this could or would lead to totalitarianism. Her stomach sank.

That's what's new. There used to be the option of opting out. But now that's over. Completion is the end. We're closing the circle around everyone—it's a totalitarian nightmare.

The fact is that all left-wing political dictatorships since the French Revolution have ended up being in some way totalitarian: that is, directing not just the politics of the nation under revolution but the social and cultural fabric of the entire society.

Jean Kirkpatrick, made a strong point during her career that left-wing totalitarianism was far more dangerous than fascism. She maintained that fascism invariably left alone areas of cultural expression that it did not consider directly threatening to its political existence.

It was not known precisely how many labor camps there were in North Korea, although the international consensus was six. The fact that they were numbered and those numbers reached at least as high as twenty-two was an indicator of their pervasiveness. At least two hundred thousand North Koreans, or nearly one percent of the entire population, called these labor camps home.

It'd be like casting a ballot for Stalin: you are voting for an end to all voting.

An extermination center can only manufacture corpses; a society of total domination creates a world of the living dead...

Socialism is inseparably interwoven with Totalitarianism and the abject worship of the State. It is not alone that property, in all its forms, is struck at, but that liberty, in all its forms, is challenged by the fundamental conceptions of Socialism.

Fascism was the shadow or ugly child of Communism

As Fascism sprang from Communism, so Nazism developed from Fascism.

The secular state becomes almost automatically totalitarian, so that no room is left for man's spiritual freedom.

But democrats are seldom welcome on planets run by totalitarian governments, and scarcely more welcome on planets where anarchy prevails--this is due to the very nature of democracy, the only practical compromise between totalitarianism and anarchy.

La rationalité technologique de l'univers totalitaire est la forme la plus récente qu'a pu prendre l'idée de Raison.

Any attempt to replace a personal conscience by a collective conscience does violence to the individual and is the first step toward totalitarianism.

North Korea is perhaps the darkest place in the world. The country lacks electricity; everything is gray and monotone

He had seen the banning of books, music and films, the closure of theaters and cinemas, the outlawing of football, and all the other countless ways in which the Libyan dictatorship, like a crazed jealous lover, infiltrated every aspect of public and private life.

Who destroys books? Cities, churches, dictators and fanatics. Their fingers itch to build a pyre and strike the match. On 10 May 1933, students gathered in Berlin to dance around a bonfire of 25,000 volumes of 'un-German' books. They burned, amongst many others, Bertolt Brecht, Otto Dix, Heinrich Heine, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce and H.G. Wells. They destroyed them because the contents were too dangerous.

Scholars of totalitarianism talk about the importance of this constant movement, this forever war, this need to do battle on behalf of something that needs protection. In Russia, this something has been postulated as faith and traditional values.

In the post-Soviet era, instead of freedom, various stripes of autocratic-totalitarianism have flourished: Russian, Belarusian, Kazakh... We are finding our way out from under the debris of the 'Red Empire' slowly and tentatively.