Quotes About Totalitarianism

How can one explain the attraction terror holds for some minds — and why for intellectuals? . . .In a totalitarian and terrorist regime, man is no longer a unique being with infinite possibilities and limitless choices but a number, a puppet, with just this difference — numbers and puppets are not susceptible to fear.

There is no discussing theology, sociology and politics when someone is under the spell of a self-enclosed totalitarian ideology. Intentionally or out of ignorance, Ahmed, who is empirical in all matters, detests pointless and laborious philosophical imaginings, never-ending discussions, or clashes of ideas that might be respectful of non-believer opponents and sinners deserving only of complete contempt.

'Brave New World' dealt with a kind of proto-genetic engineering of the unborn, through really, as many dystopias do, it dealt with totalitarianism. The 1997 film 'Gattaca' updated 'Brave New World,' bringing us to a future where genetic testing determined your job, your wealth, your status in life.

The real evil of the Russian communist state is not communism. It is the secret police and the concentration camp.

'The Handmaid's Tale' is a horrifying and horrifyingly possible vision of the future.

The twentieth century became an age of totalitarianism, culminating in the attempt of Hitler and Stalin to establish a new kind of political order based on total police control, terror, and the ruthless suppression and murder of real or imagined opponents in their millions on the one hand, and continual mass mobilization and enthusiasm whipped up by sophisticated propaganda methods on the other.30

If when the chips are down, the world's most powerful nation… acts like a pitiful, helpless giant, the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy will threaten free nations and free institutions throughout the world.

Bio-survival anxiety will only permanently disappear when world-wide wealth has reached a level, and a distribution, where, without totalitarianism, everyone has enough tickets.

Rejection of science and free discussion are, of course, characteristic of all totalitarian movements; thus, nonbiblical astronomy was heretical to the Inquisition, unpalatable anthropology was Jewish to the Nazis, unsatisfactory biology was banned as bourgeois in Stalin's Russia and irritating ethology is sexist (and unpleasant psychology is chauvinist) to these ladies.

wanted to know how five years of Nazism followed by four and a half decades of Stalinism had affected this landscape and the people who inhabited it.

Freedom must mean that institutions have the autonomy to determine their own practices and admirations within the law. Otherwise, we confront the totalitarian demand that everyone should think the same thing and participate in the same admirations.

One People, one Reign, one Leader.

There is an absolutely fundamental hostility on the part of totalitarian regimes toward religion.

AÃ…Â¥ žije Jednotný stát, aÃ…Â¥ žijí ?ísla, aÃ…Â¥ žije Dobroditel!

What was wrong with communism wasn't aberrant leadership, it was communism.

Leadership is all hype. We've had three great leaders in this century-Hitler, Stalin, and Mao.

A just society will appear less spectacular, and less clearly defined, than a society with totalitarian leadership, theocratic goals.

Si l'on faisait l'histoire comparée du monde chrétien et du monde musulman, on découvrirait d'un côté une religion longtemps intolérante, porteuse d'une évidente tentation totalitaire, mais qui s'est peu à peu muée en religion d'ouverture, de l'autre côté une religion porteuse d'une vocation d'ouverture, mais qui peu à peu dérivé vers des comportements intolérants et totalitaires.

Well-intentioned liberalism always leads to progressivism. There's no choice there. Once that action is taken the only thing you can run on is totalitarianism - you have no choice.

Totalitarian states killed with impunity and no one was held accountable. That didn't happen in the West.

Stalin elaborated the Stalinist version of building socialism into a coherent ideological doctrine.

Private enterprise flourished in much of the economy. Intellectual life was far from completely regimented.[491] The secret police, albeit an object of fear for many, was not operating as the terror machine that it was later to become and was not yet one man's political instrument. Neither the population at large nor the tens of thousands composing the politically influential class could be described (in the language of the theory of totalitarianism) as an "atomized mass.

there were tiny swastikas on the taps. (There was no escaping the Führer's aesthetic, thought Hartmann, not even when one took a shit.)

Of course, the Nazi movement was unique in terms of its killing machines and its policy of rounding up millions of people in order to systematically murder them. Nonetheless, the Nazi form of cultism has close resemblances to that of other political and religious groups, and leaves no doubt about cultist capacities for infinite murderousness.