Quotes About Totalitarianism

Totalitarians always want to kill culture. But imagine life without football, Faulkner, or Bob Dylan. It's not life.

The real point is that totalitarian regimes have claimed jurisdiction over the whole person, and the whole society, and they don't at all believe that we should give unto Caesar that which is Caesar's and unto God that which is God's.

What makes 'The Handmaid's Tale' so terrifying is that everything that happens in it is plausible.

What gives the new despotism its peculiar effectiveness is indeed its liaison with humanitarianism, but beyond this fact its capacity for entering into the smallest details of human life.

it is not the particular themes of Nazism or Italian Fascism that define the nature of the fascist phenomenon, but their function. Fascisms seek out in each national culture those themes that are best capable of mobilizing a mass movement of regeneration, unification, and purity, directed against liberal individualism and constitutionalism and against Leftist class struggle.

In May 1941, when the German army overran and split up Yugoslavia, the pre-war terrorist-nationalist Ustaša and its longtime leader Ante Paveli? were permitted to take power in the newly independent state of Croatia. Even Nazi onlookers were appalled by the disorderly slaughters in which the Ustaša massacred a soberly estimated 500,000 Serbs, 200,000 Croats, 90,000 Bosnian Muslims, 60,000 Jews, 50,000 Montenegrins, and 30,000 Slovenes.

Extreme radicalization remains latent in all fascisms, but the circumstances of war, and particularly of victorious wars of conquest, gave it the fullest means of expression.

Fascisms seek out in each national culture those themes that are best capable of mobilizing a mass movement of regeneration, unification, and purity, directed against liberal individualism and constitutionalism and against Leftist class struggle.

In totalitarian regimes, dissidence is treated as a mental illness. In apartheid regimes, interracial contact is treated as unnatural. In free-market regimes, self-interest is treated as hardwired.

The mob was made up of 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 embodiments of the politics of resentment. Arendt thought that the leadership of totalitarian movements came from this group.

You and I are told we must choose between a left or right, but I suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down. Up to man's age-old dream -- the maximum of individual freedom consistent with order --or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism. Regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would sacrifice freedom for security have embarked on this downward path.

Information is the oxygen of the modern age. It seeps through the walls topped by barbed wire, it wafts across the electrified borders. ... The Goliath of totalitarianism will be brought down by the David of the microchip.

You and I are told increasingly that we have to choose between a left or a right. There is only an up or down: up to man's age-old dream -- the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order -- or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism. And regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would trade our freedom for security have embarked on this downward course.

Yes, our country has its shortcomings, but there's no moral equivalency between democracy and totalitarianism…There's no moral equivalency between propaganda and the truth.

Throughout my life, I guess there's been one thing that's troubled me more than any other: the abuse of people and the theft of their democratic rights, whether by a totalitarian government, an employer, or anyone else. I probably got it from my father; Jack never bristled more than when he thought working people were being exploited.

individuals who refuse to adapt to a totalitarian regime are not doing so out of a sense of duty or because of naïveté but because they cannot help but be true to themselves

We admire people who oppose the regime in totalitarian country and think they have courage or a strong moral sense or have remained true to their principles and the like. We may also smile at their naïveté, thinking, Don't they realise that their words are of no use at all against this oppressive power? That they will hath to pay dearly for their protest?

books are burned, they will, in the end, burn people, too.

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

What reason have we Americans to think that our own society will necessarily escape the world-wide drift toward the totalitarian organization of men and institutions?

A portrait of the führer glowers over every classroom.

It is essential to realise, that, while we make efforts to live the Christian life today, the world which have formed in our spoiled times, demands soul, both in the everyday life and in the religion, and can be called totalitarian.

We cannot hope to resist the coming soft totalitarianism if we do not have our spiritual lives in order. This is the message of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the great anti-communist dissident, Nobel laureate, and Orthodox Christian. He believed the core of the crisis that created and sustained communism was not political but spiritual.

The more totalitarian a regime's nature, the more it will try to force people to forget their cultural memories. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the role of Winston Smith within the Ministry of Information is to erase all newspaper records of past events to reflect the current political priorities of the Party. This, said the ex-communist Polish intellectual Leszek Ko?akowski, reflects "the great ambition of totalitarianism—the total possession and control of human memory.