Top 100 Quotes About Totalitarianism
#1. To totalitarianism, an opponent is by definition subversive; democracy treats subversives as mere opponents for fear of betraying its principles.
Jean Francois Revel
#2. Very few tyrants argued for the slavery of the masses. Instead, they argued for their right to protect the people from themselves.
A.E. Samaan
#3. I hate your reasons. I don't want reasons. If you see somebody in pain, people like you reason and reason. You say - pain is a good thing, perhaps he'll be better for it one day. I want to let my heart speak ... Yes. At the end of a gun.
Graham Greene
#4. The entire stock of relationships which suited in war - militiae - was regarded as inadmissible and improper in peace - domi. We have the measure of how right the Romans were in this respect in the experience of the intellectual and moral impoverishment brought about by total mobilisation.
Bertrand De Jouvenel
#5. The priceless heritage of our society is the unrestricted constitutional right of each member to think as he will. Thought control is a copyright of totalitarianism, and we have no claim to it.
Robert H. Jackson
#6. [Socialistic] economic planning, regulation, and intervention pave the way to totalitarianism by building a power structure that will inevitably be seized by the most power-hungry and unscrupulous.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#7. Because if you lived, as I did, several years under Nazi totalitarianism, and then 20 years in communist totalitarianism, you would certainly realize how precious freedom is, and how easy it is to lose your freedom.
Milos Forman
#8. The 'gallows' are not only a symbol of death, but also a symbol of cruelty, terror and irreverence for life; the common denominator of primitive savagery, medieval fanaticism and modern totalitarianism.
Arthur Koestler
#9. The prose is deeply inspired by the tension between post- totalitarianism and consumer democracy. I am constantly probing the soft fleshy parts of the American dream.
Alina Stefanescu
#10. As every advance of Power is useful for war, so war is useful for the advance of power; war is like a sheep-dog harrying the laggard Powers to catch up their smarter fellows in the totalitarian race.
Bertrand De Jouvenel
#11. Something about how all this could or would lead to totalitarianism. Her stomach sank.
Dave Eggers
#12. In contrast to totalitarianism, democracy can face and live with the truth about itself.
Sidney Hook
#13. It is probably true that business corrupts everything it touches. It corrupts politics, sports, literature, art, labor unions and so on. But business also corrupts and undermines monolithic totalitarianism. Capitalism is at its liberating best in a noncapitalist environment.
Eric Hoffer
#14. Totalitarianism spells simplification: an enormous reduction in the variety of aims, motives, interests, human types, and, above all, in the categories and units of power.
Eric Hoffer
#15. 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 .
Ludwig Von Mises
#16. The opposite of Nazi is neither Republican nor Democrat, conservative or liberal. Totalitarianism's diametric opposite of is Libertarianism.
A.E. Samaan
#17. Human rights commissions, as they are evolving, are an attack on our fundamental freedoms and the basic existence of a democratic society ... It is in fact totalitarianism. I find this is very scary stuff.
Stephen Harper
#18. At a time I used to think that in a world without guards people would walk differently from the way we do in our country. Where people are allowed to think and write differently, I thought, they will also walk differently.
Herta Muller
#19. Whoever we were - and it was not really important what religion we belonged to, whether we wished to wear the veil or not, whether we observed certain religious norms or not - we had become the figment of someone else's dreams.
Azar Nafisi
#20. None of the evils which totalitarianism ... claims to remedy is worse than totalitarianism itself.
Albert Camus
#21. 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
#22. The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect.
George Orwell
#23. Socialism is "group-think." How uninformed in history do you have to be to advocate for "group-think"??
A.E. Samaan
#24. East Germany was so total in its totalitarianism that everything was banned which wasn't compulsory.
P. J. O'Rourke
#25. 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 in the holy name of liberty or democracy?
Mahatma Gandhi
#26. The way to make the giving a free vote safe for a totalitarian capitalist regime is simple - make all political parties the same!
Dave Mearns
#27. The face of totalitarianism turned out to be a mask - obviously - but the face of Capitalism has no face at all.
Paul Kane
#28. Totalitarianism is patriotism institutionalized.
Steve Allen
#29. Liberalism will beat totalitarianism by killing it softly, not by mimicking it.
Maajid Nawaz
#30. I was interested in the ways that artists responded to totalitarianism - the Czech Jazz Section, Romanian absurdist theatre, Brecht's alienation effect. The anything-goes, anarchic qualities of jazz and Surrealism seemed to offer a way to cross some of the forbidden frontiers of Eastern Europe.
Nicholas Royle
#31. Basically National Socialism and Marxism are the same thing
Adolf Hitler
#32. Like Alexis de Tocqueville, they feared unfettered democracy and believed totalitarianism was the natural consequence of mass democracy run amok. They
Kim R. Holmes
#33. Any attempt to replace a personal conscience by a collective conscience does violence to the individual and is the first step toward totalitarianism.
Hermann Hesse
#34. But I was only a chaotic walker, nobody could stop me; even a totalitarian state was not able to control my daydreams, my poetic fascinations, the pattern of my walking.
Adam Zagajewski
#35. The basic cause of totalitarianism is two ideas: men's rejection of reason in favor of faith, and of self-interest in favor of self-sacrifice. If
Ayn Rand
#36. The only successful revolution of this century is totalitarianism.
Bernard-Henri Levy
#37. They were kids. Kids don't care about totalitarianism. For my parents, Prague is picnics on Petrin Hill and homemade knedliky. It's home. They didn't notice the tanks in the backyard, the blood in the streets.
Robin Wasserman
#38. Modern totalitarianism can be defined as the establishment, by means of the state of exception, of a legal civil war that allows for the physical elimination not only of political adversaries but of entire categories of citizens who for some reason cannot be integrated into the political system
Giorgio Agamben
#39. 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.
Christopher Stasheff
#40. Inverted totalitarianism, unlike classical totalitarianism, does not revolve around a demagogue or charismatic leader. It finds expression in the anonymity of the Corporate State. It purports to cherish democracy, patriotism, and the Constitution while manipulating internal levers.
Chris Hedges
#41. We must get rid of the IRS. It's a bureaucracy fraught with totalitarianism.
Sonny Bono
#42. A "centrally planned economy" by definition discourages and despises participation by the masses. It's a bureaucratic oligarchy.
A.E. Samaan
#44. In the same way that slavery was a moral challenge for the 19th century and totalitarianism was a challenge for the 20th century, the challenge that women and girls face around the world is the moral challenge of our time.
Sheryl WuDunn
#45. If no divine law is recognized above the law of the State, then the law of man has become absolute in men's eyes
there is then no logical barrier to totalitarianism.
Greg L. Bahnsen
#46. The internet, our greatest tool of emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen. The internet is a threat to human civilization.
Julian Assange
#47. If you can feel that staying human is worth while, even when it can't have any result whatever, you've beaten them.
George Orwell
#48. In so far as it takes effect at all, pacifist propaganda can only be effective against those countries where a certain amount of freedom of speech is still permitted; in other words it is helpful to totalitarianism.
George Orwell
#49. It's ridiculous to talk about freedom in a society dominated by huge corporations. What kind of freedom is there inside a corporation? They're totalitarian institutions - you take orders from above and maybe give them to people below you. There's about as much freedom as under Stalinism.
Noam Chomsky
#50. The new soft totalitarianism that is advancing on the left wants to have a state religion It is an atheist, nihilistic religion - but it is a religion that is obligatory for all.
Rocco Buttiglione
#51. A Stalin functionary admitted, Innocent people were arrested: naturally - otherwise no one would be frightened. If people, he said, were arrested only for specific misdemeanours, all the others would feel safe and so become ripe for treason.
Paul Johnson
#52. The misconception of totalitarianism is that freedom can be imprisoned. This is not the case. When you constrain freedom, freedom will take flight and land on a windowsill.
Ai Weiwei
#53. 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.
Winston S. Churchill
#54. The people who must never have power are the humorless. To impossible certainties of rectitude they ally tedium and uniformity.
Christopher Hitchens
#55. The supreme trick of mass insanity is that it persuades you that the only abnormal person is the one who refuses to join in the madness of others, the one who tries vainly to resist. We will never understand totalitarianism if we do not understand that people rarely have the strength to be uncommon.
Eugene Ionesco
#56. Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.
Hanna Arendt
#57. To declare the Cold War over, and declare democracy has won out over totalitarianism, is a measure of arrogance and wrong-headedness.
Alexander Haig
#58. Communism is what happens when Socialists realize that they want complete control over every aspect of human life.
A.E. Samaan
#59. 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
#60. For the Left, tolerance does not mean tolerance. It means first, acceptance. And second, celebration. That is totalitarianism: You not only have to live with what you may differ with, dear citizen, you have to celebrate it or pay a steep price.
Dennis Prager
#61. I'm a fuzzy-headed warm-hearted liberal, and I think fuzzy-headed warm-hearted liberalism is an ideological stance that needs defending-if necessary, with a hob-nailed boot-kick to the bollocks of budding totalitarianism.
Charles Stross
#62. I wish to understand [Plato], but to treat him with as little reverence as if he were a contemporary English or American advocate of totalitarianism.
Bertrand Russell
#63. One of the greatest advantages of the totalitarian elites of the twenties and thirties was to turn any statement of fact into a question of motive.
Hannah Arendt
#64. And I believe that totalitarianism, if not fought against, could triumph again.
George Orwell
#65. 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.
Ludwig Von Mises
#66. The real division in the world today is not between socialism and capitalism, it's between freedom and totalitarianism.
Frank Underhill
#67. I propose that the forces of corporate totalitarianism are deliberately destroying this entire world in order to sell their simulated version of it back to us at a profit.
Diane Harvey
#68. I never loved totalitarianism and all the ideas of making mankind happy always seemed crazy to me.
Stanislaw Lem
#69. Democracy is the opposite of totalitarianism, communism, fascism, or mobocracy.
Frank Lloyd Wright
#70. Then the white man talk about how some people trying to use smooth talk to win people over and how totalitarianism always happens with consent and we nod like we understand.
Marlon James
#71. Everything not forbidden is compulsory
T.H. White
#72. Freedom-loving people around the world must say ... I am a refugee in a crowded boat foundering off the coast of Vietnam. I am Laotian, a Cambodian, a Cuban, and a Miskito Indian in Nicaragua. I, too, am a potential victim of totalitarianism.
Ronald Reagan
#73. Book cover, 'Reefer Club' Totalitarianism is when people believe they can punish their way to perfection.
Newt Gingrich
#74. In his State of the Union speech in January 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt declared America's commitment to Four Freedoms in the struggle against Nazi totalitarianism. Among them was the freedom from fear.
Robert Dallek
#75. Ultimately, totalitarianism is the only sort of politics that can truly serve the sky-god's purpose. Any movement of a liberal nature endangers his authority and that of his delegates on earth. One God, one King, one Pope, one master in the factory, one father-leader in the family at home.
Gore Vidal
#76. I worry that we don't currently have a democracy in the United States. Instead we have what [political philosopher] Sheldon Wolin has recently labeled a sort of inverted totalitarianism.
Thomas L. Dumm
#77. '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.
Ramez Naam
#78. Russia needs a strong state power and must have it. But I am not calling for totalitarianism.
Vladimir Putin
#79. Totalitarianism is feudalism in the twelfth century sense of the word.
Barbara Amiel
#80. Mengistu does not understand the meaning of self-determination, either historically or in the abstract. He cannot conceive of a nation as anything but an absolute centralized authority, totalitarianism, for his rule is nothing less than that now.
Mengistu Haile Mariam
#82. Liberalism is totalitarianism with a human face.
Thomas Sowell
#83. Sceptical Ketman is widely disseminated throughout intellectual circles. One argues that humanity does not know how to handle its knowledge or how to resolve the problems of production and division of goods.
Czeslaw Milosz
#84. Globalization is a form of totalitarianism ... It is the rich who rule, and the poor live as they can.
Jose Saramago
#85. I have read somewhere that in a totalitarian system martyrdom does better than thought.
Vaclav Havel
#86. 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.
Patrick Chappatte
#87. How is it that when we see politics permeate every life sector we call it totalitarianism and when we see religion everywhere we call it theocracy, but when commerce dominates everything we call it liberty?
Benjamin Barber
#88. The strongest argument against totalitarianism may be a recognition of a universal human nature; that all humans have innate desires for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The doctrine of the blank slate ... is a totalitarian's dream.
Steven Pinker
#89. Let us never allow ourselves to think that poverty is an excuse for an invitation to totalitarianism, and if we should be tempted to think as much, let us remind ourselves that totalitarianism not only extinguishes liberty but institutionalises poverty as well
Bernard Levin
#90. The spirit of religious totalitarianism is abroad in the world; it is in the very air we breathe today in this land. Everywhere are those who claim to have a corner on righteousness, on direct access to God ... The bigots of the world are having a heyday.
Sonia Johnson
#91. This is naturally the most important thing, the dark traces left by the era of totalitarianism in the human mind, where is - are difficult to do away with. And this is a very demanding job.
Judy Woodruff
#92. Like so many nice people who seek power, I wanted to force everyone else to be nice. It's called totalitarianism.
Maajid Nawaz
#93. The worse things are, the more they play philosopher. The more obvious the nonsense, the profounder their thoughts. The more lawlessness there is, the more laws. The more widespread the chaos, the more insistent their love of symmetry.
Tadeusz Konwicki
#94. Religion, a medieval form of unreason, when combined with modern weaponry becomes a real threat to our freedoms. This religious totalitarianism has caused a deadly mutation in the heart of Islam and we see the tragic consequences in Paris today.
Salman Rushdie
#95. A tax-supported, compulsory educational system is the complete model of the totalitarian state.
Isabel Paterson
#96. The distrust of wit is the beginning of tyranny.
Edward Abbey
#97. The essential principle of totalitarianism is to make laws that are impossible to obey.
Christopher Hitchens
#98. A civilization in which there is not a continuous controversy about important issues is on the way to totalitarianism and death
Robert M. Hutchins
#99. Having lived through the transition from totalitarianism, I am acutely mindful of the need to never take for granted the basic freedoms of thought, expression and belief that democracy brings.
Daisaku Ikeda
#100. To Buckley, she embodied the worst of what in subsequent decades would be called political correctness: the mindless application to every issue of a platitudinous egalitarianism whose practical effect invariably is to expand the reach of totalitarianism.
William F. Buckley Jr.
