“ The essential principle of totalitarianism is to make laws that are impossible to obey. ”
- Christopher Hitchens- Copy
- 2.9K
“ A democracy without values easily turns into open or thinly disguised totalitarianism. ”
- Pope John Paul II- Copy
- 1.5K
“ Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy. ”
- Jorge Luis Borges- Copy
- 2.9K
“ The only successful revolution of this century is totalitarianism. ”
- Bernard Henri Levy- Copy
- 3.8K
“ Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda. ”
- Hannah Arendt- Copy
- 3.4K
“ Tyranny and despotism can be exercised by many, more rigourously, more vigourously, and more severely, than by one. ”
- Andrew Johnson- Copy
- 2.6K
“ Totalitarianism is never content to rule by external means, namely, through the state and a machinery of violence; thanks to its peculiar ideology and the role assigned to it in this apparatus of coercion, totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within. ”
- Hannah Arendt- Copy
- 3.9K
“ A totalitarian society which succeeded in perpetuating itself would probably set up a schizophrenic system of thought, in which the laws of common sense held good in everyday life and in certain exact sciences, but could be disregarded by the politician, the historian, and the sociologist. ”
- George Orwell- Copy
- 3.7K
“ What I'm saying is simply that every totalitarian society, no matter how strict, has had its underground. In fact, two undergrounds. There's the underground involved in political resistance and the underground involved in preserving beauty and fun — which is to say, preserving the human spirit. ”
- Tom Robbins- Copy
- 3.1K
“ The worst crime committed by totalitarian mind-sets is that they force their citizens, including their victims, to become complicit in their crimes. Dancing with your jailer, participating in your own execution, that is an act of utmost brutality. ”
- Azar Nafisi- Copy
- 2.7K
“ We take for granted the need to escape the self. Yet the self can also be a refuge. In totalitarian countries the great hunger is for private life. Absorption in the minutiae of an individual existence is the only refuge from the apocalyptic madhouse staged by maniacal saviors of humanity. ”
- Eric Hoffer- Copy
- 2.2K
“ Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. ”
- C. S. Lewis- Copy
- 370
“ Even though Christ Himself would not deliver us from the power of the Totalitarian State, as He did not deliver Himself, we must see His purpose in it all. Maybe his children are being persecuted by the world in order that they might withdraw themselves from the world… ”
- Fulton J. Sheen- Copy
- 3.8K
“ No matter how thoroughly they control a system, disorder invariably leaks into it. Then the managers panic, rush to plug the leak and endeavor to tighten the controls. Therefore, totalitarianism grows in viciousness and scope. ”
- Tom Robbins- Copy
- 2.4K
“ The fallacy is to believe that under a dictatorial government you can be free inside. Quite a number of people console themselves with this thought, now that totalitarianism in one form or another is visibly on the up-grade in every part of the world… ”
- George Orwell- Copy
- 1.4K
“ The tragedy of the national totalitarian states consists principally in this: while they require the total devotion of the person, they lack and even repudiate explicitly all understanding and respect for the person and its interior riches. In consequence, they are impelled to seek a principle of human exaltation in myths of outward grandeur and unending efforts toward external power and prestige… ”
- Jacques Maritain- Copy
- 2K
“ The power of the Executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgment of his peers, is in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all totalitarian government whether Nazi or Communist. ”
- Winston Churchill- Copy
- 3.2K
“ Totalitarianism... does not so much promise an age of faith as an age of schizophrenia. A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud… ”
- George Orwell- Copy
- 1.2K
“ We had all become used to the totalitarian system and accepted it as an unchangeable fact and thus helped to perpetuate it. In other words, we are all — though naturally to differing extents — responsible for the operation of the totalitarian machinery… ”
- Vaclav Havel- Copy
- 277
“ As moral and spiritual values cease to exact an unswerving commitment, an unquestioning allegiance; as we discuss them, have reservations about them, modify them and quantify them; so do our lives become infused with that metaphysical vagueness which is the blight of the natural condition… ”
- Unknown- Copy
- 681
“ 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. ”
- Ronald Reagan- Copy
- 2.2K
“ Surely one thing to be learned from the lapsed totalitarian system was the unwholesome relationship between the cult of the masses and the adoration of the supreme personality. ”
- Christopher Hitchens- Copy
- 781
“ No tyrant need fear till men begin to feel confident in each other. ”
- Unknown- Copy
- 958
“ A king ruleth as he ought, a tyrant as he lists, a king to the profit of all, a tyrant only to please a few. ”
- Unknown- Copy
- 3.9K
“ Since it is difficult to join them together, it is safer to be feared than to be loved when one of the two must be lacking. ”
- Niccolo Machiavelli- Copy
- 794
“ Anarchy is simply the handmaiden and forerunner of tyranny and despotism. ”
- Theodore Roosevelt- Copy
- 577
“ Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. ”
- C.S. Lewis- Copy
- 1.3K
“ What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy? ”
- Mahatma Gandhi- Copy
- 1.7K
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