Quotes About Totalitarianism

The same generation that had been driven to such depths in the 1930s rose up to push back the forces of totalitarianism in a two-ocean global war in the 1940s.

A real totalitarianism is at work in the world and wants to impose its views not only on Arab Muslims, but on the West. The same way that they veil women, Islamic radicals want to veil cartoons in the press.

The Chinese art world does not exist. In a society that restricts individual freedoms and violates human rights, anything that calls itself creative or independent is a pretence. It is impossible for a totalitarian society to create anything with passion and imagination.

Just as Chairman Mao and Joseph Stalin started by going after the intellectuals, against those whose words who might form an opposition to them, so Trump has gone across us. Free speech is first among equals when we look at what is being violated by this new regime.

It is a violation which has obsessed the tyrants of the twentieth century. They do not want simply to kill their opponents, but to liquidate them, to deny that they have ever existed.

It is not true that virtually all news in a totalitarian state is false.

In "The Free World," Louis Menand paraphrased Hannah Arendt to describe the early 20th-century proponents of totalitarianism as "the refuse of every class: disempowered aristocrats, disillusioned intellectuals, gangsters, denizens of the underworld. They were people who believed that the respectable world was a conspiracy to deny them what they were owed; they were the embodiments of the politics of resentment.

But even a victory of planning will not mean the end of history. Atrocious wars among the candidates for the supreme office will break out. Totalitarianism may wipe out civilization, even the whole of the human race. Then, of course, history will have come to its end too.

Inflation is the fiscal complement of statism and arbitrary government. It is a cog in the complex of policies and institutions which gradually lead toward totalitarianism.

It is vain to fight totalitarianism by adopting totalitarian methods. Freedom can only be won by men unconditionally committed to the principles of freedom. The first requisite for a better social order is the return to unrestricted freedom of thought and speech.

What Communism was to the twentieth century, Islam will be for the next one hundred years.19

Heil Hitler

Goldberg argues that fascism and communism, far from being opposites, are "closely related historical competitors for the same constituents.

When you fuse the two ideas of "nation" and "socialism," what you get is National Socialism.

The first fascists," Anthony James Gregor tells us, "were almost all Marxists.

Mussolini, for his part, praised FDR's book Looking Forward and basically declared FDR to be a fellow fascist. Hitler too saw FDR as a kindred spirit and the New Deal was widely praised as an American form of fascism in the Nazi Party's official newspaper Volkischer Beobachter and other Nazi publications.

Orwell. Wrote a book that said that a totalitarian society sustains itself by the basic selfishness of everybody. When the chips were down, his hero and heroine betrayed each other.

First of all, I don't think fascism is an ideology. I think it is a method, it's a system.

Marx's dream of a workers' paradise had degenerated into an Orwellian nightmare; conformity was the highest good, informants kept watch on every block, whole countries lived behind barbed wire, and governments insisted that down was up and black was white.

A dictatorship by any other name is still a dictatorship, whether its symbol is the czarist two-headed eagle or the hammer and sickle.

Fascist is someone who claims to speak for a whole nation or group, is utterly unconcerned with the rights of others, and is willing to use violence and whatever other means are necessary to achieve the goals he or she might have.

Historian Robert Paxton begins one of his books by asserting: "Fascism was the major political innovation of the twentieth century, and the source of much of its pain.

the Fascist game plan: a single party, speaking with one voice, controlling every state institution, claiming to represent all people, and labeling the entire sham a triumph of the popular will.

Democrats pleaded with their countrymen to recognize the Communists' hypocrisy—that the same partisans who bragged about opposing Fascism were now aping its techniques. The Communists were simply replacing pictures of Hitler with portraits of Stalin and, like Mussolini's Blackshirts, attacking the press, smearing political rivals, demanding total loyalty from party members, and threatening anyone who stood in their way.