Repressive Quotes

#1. Repressive societies always seemed to understand the danger of "wrong" ideas.

Octavia E. Butler

#2. If the tenth of the population that is gay became visible tomorrow, the panic of the majority of people would inspire repressive legislation of a sort that would shock even the pessimists among us.

Jane Rule

#3. Colonialism is known in its primitive form, that is to say, by the permanent settling of repressive foreign powers, with an army, services, policies. This phase has known cruel colonial occupations which have lasted 300 years in Indonesia.

Ahmed Ben Bella

#4. A crowded society is a restrictive society; an overcrowded society becomes an authoritarian, repressive and murderous society.

Edward Abbey

#5. I write as someone who has no more time for repressive Islam than he does for repressive Christianity or Judaism, but at least look at the face in the hijab - and try to imagine the one beneath the niqab - before you depersonalise its wearer.

Will Self

#6. As far as we could tell, the face of the revolution was a sea of embroidering women, patiently waiting the resignation of their repressive governor.

Diana Denham

#7. And the proof of his insanity? His belief that the U.S. government was a repressive conspiracy that muzzled radical opinion. Only an insane person would believe that! The Unabomber had really, really liked Leila.

Jonathan Franzen

#8. But the hard facts were that fifty years of non-violence had brought the African people nothing but more and more repressive legislation, and fewer and fewer rights.

Nelson Mandela

#9. My point of view, while extremely cogent, is unpopular ... That the repressive nature of the legalities vis-a-vis drugs are destroying the legal system and corrupting the police system.

Jack Nicholson

#10. But I think theatre in a repressive society is an immensely exciting event and theatre in a luxurious old, affluent old society like ours is an entertaining event.

Janet Suzman

#11. Congress, it turns out, is filled with Republicans and Democrats eager to act as enablers for the most repressive forces in Iran.

Stephen Kinzer

#12. I often traveled to Nicaragua to speak against repressive policies by the Sandinista government.

Bianca Jagger

#13. And that is the problem with a society that doesn't read books. The most painful form of censorship does not come from a centralized, repressive government. It is a cast, black cloak of a nation's indifference.

Lourd De Veyra

#14. Repressive states are developing weapons that could cause destruction on a massive scale.

Tony Blair

#15. In insisting, for political purposes, on a sharp division between gay and straight, gay activism, like much of feminism, has become as rigid and repressive as the old order it sought to replace.

Camille Paglia

#16. That's always a fun thing to play, a relationship where there's equals. I often play roles that are repressive, or women who are slightly repressed or having some kind of internal conflict.

Laila Robins

#17. Writers in repressive societies are considered dangerous. That's why so many of them are in jail.

Don DeLillo

#18. Even today, England is a very repressed, repressive country, and there's pressure to be kind of a certain way, so people do things that ultimately make them sad.

Ben Whishaw

#19. Unfortunately, little attention was paid to how Arafat ruled. In fact, some saw the harsh and repressive nature of Arafat's regime as actually bolstering the prospects for peace.

Natan Sharansky

#20. Only art is capable of dismantling the repressive effects of a senile social system that continues to totter along the deathline: to dismantle in order to build A SOCIAL ORGANISM AS A WORK OF ART.

Joseph Beuys

#21. Since religion bore false witness to the Divine, religion was blasphemy. And once it entered into its unholy alliance with politics, it became the most dangerous and repressive force that the world has ever known.

Tom Robbins

#22. The capacity of the human mind for swallowing nonsense and spewing it forth in violent and repressive action has never yet been plumbed.

Robert A. Heinlein

#23. The United States now has the highest rate of incarceration in the world, dwarfing the rates of nearly every developed country, even surpassing those in highly repressive regimes like Russia, China, and Iran.

Michelle Alexander

#24. On many questions and specially in view of the marriage bed, the Puritans were the indulgent party, ... they were much more Chestertonian than their adversaries. The idea that a Puritan was a repressed and repressive person would have astonished Sir Thomas More and Luther about equally.

C.S. Lewis

#25. Unlike white commentators, who were hamstrung by the fear that they would be labeled racist, I could voice my criticisms of the feudal, religious, and repressive mechanisms that were holding back women from Muslim communities.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

#26. One repressive state after another has had to face the dilemma of wanting abundant Internet for economic advancement, while ruing the ways in which its citizens can become empowered to express themselves fearlessly.

Jonathan Zittrain

#27. I heard the Empire has a tyrannical and repressive government!"
"What form of government is that?" said Ponder Stibbons.
"A tautology," said the Dean, from above.

Terry Pratchett

#28. repressive cough

Nicholas Monsarrat

#29. But here too it should be noted that the President's approach was to first ask the repressive and brutal Taliban to surrender Osama bin Laden to us, and only after that government refused to do that did we invade.

Barney Frank

#30. America has learned what our repressive and terrorist adversaries do not understand: that liberty without law is anarchy, liberty to defy law is rebellion, but liberty limited by law is the cornerstone of civilization.

David Jeremiah

#31. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked.

Timothy Snyder

#32. Left-wing movements have tended to be unisex, and asexual in their imagery. Right-wing movements, however puritanical and repressive the realities they usher in, have an erotic surface. Certainly Nazism is "sexier" than communism.

Susan Sontag

#33. For Stirner, the social axiom of conservative, liberal, and socialist schools of political thought alike is in itself repressive: it disguises as potentially redemptive an order whose central function is inhibitory of the individual's interests.

John Carroll

#34. Grave security concerns can arise as a result of demographic trends, chronic poverty, economic inequality, environmental degradation, pandemic diseases, organized crime, repressive governance and other developments no state can control alone. Arms can't address such concerns.

Ban Ki-moon

#35. The hope of Internet anarchists was that repressive governments would have only two options: accept the Internet with its limitless possibilities of spreading information, or restrict Internet access to the ruling elite and turn your back on the 21st century, as North Korea has done.

Peter Singer

#36. In the cabaret of globalization, the state shows itself as a table dancer that strips off everything until it is left with only the minimum indispensable garments: the repressive force.

Subcomandante Marcos

#37. I wrestled with my Catholicism for a long time. It took a long time to escape. It began with a sense that it was repressive, stern, judgmental. It was passionate, but it was terrifying. There were individual priests and nuns who were helpful, but the religion was cold.

David Rabe

#38. There is one, and only one, thing in modern society more hideous than crime namely, repressive justice.

Simone Weil

#39. My parents were lenient. My mother believed God was another word for nature. I took up Satanism not out of desperation, but out of logic. I rebelled, not but because of a religious or repressive childhood. I wanted to join the French Foreign Legion.

Anton Szandor LaVey

#40. We have witnessed all around the Middle East the tragedies that occur when citizens of repressive governments become so frustrated that they turn to those who preach violence.

Jean Sasson

#41. The only justification for repressive institutions is material and cultural deficit. But such institutions, at certain stages of history, perpetuate and produce such a deficit, and even threaten human survival.

Noam Chomsky

#42. I've seen it around the world, in the poorest countries and in countries riven with conflict, It is women who are the key to breaking out of poverty, breaking out of stagnation. It's women who can contribute to achieving real security - not bombs and bullets and repressive governments.

Queen Noor Of Jordan

#43. Governments will be provided with the choice of either accommodating themselves to co-ordinating proliferating human variety or seeking to reduce that variety by repressive measures.

Peter J. Carroll

#44. It was not by mere coincidence that sex so disturbed us for thousands of years: repressive religious dictates and social taboos grew out of aspects of our nature that cannot now just be wished away.

Alain De Botton

#45. Well, first I studied piano. I wasn't very satisfied because I though my teachers were dumb ... and repressive.

Luc Ferrari

#46. His peaceful resistance shook the foundations of an empire, exposed the emptiness of a repressive ideology, and proved that moral leadership is more powerful than any weapon.

Barack Obama

#47. I think it's very repressive for a woman to be constantly told that she has to make films about women to better represent women, but then the reverse is not found.

Romola Garai

#48. Margaret Thatcher, like George W. Bush and Tony Blair after her, never hesitated to augment the repressive and information-gathering arms of central government.

Tony Judt

#49. Those of us who decided to work for democracy in Burma made our choice in the conviction that the danger of standing up for basic human rights in a repressive society was preferable to the safety of a quiescent life in servitude

Aung San

#50. The state is not only repressive; it is also educative - shaping common sense through ideological state apparatuses (such as the academy) that normalize the rule of settler colonialism.

Audra Simpson

#51. My parents, fleeing a repressive regime in the Dominican Republic, were embraced by this country and taught us to love it in return. After my father served proudly in the U.S. Army, they settled in Buffalo, N.Y., and were able to live the American Dream.

Thomas Perez

#52. Under the rule of a repressive whole, liberty can be made into a powerful instrument of domination.

Herbert Marcuse

#53. China is the most repressive censorship regime on the Internet.

John Palfrey

#54. The manifest discourse, therefore, is really no more than the repressive presence of what it does not say; and this 'not-said' is a hollow that undermines from within all that is said.

Michel Foucault

#55. Work while you work, play while you play - this is a basic rule of repressive self-discipline.

Theodor Adorno

#56. Sheldon Van Auken wrote,"The best argument for Christianity is Christians: their joy, their certainty, their completeness." Guess what he said is the best argument against it? "When Christians are sombre, joyless, self-righteous, smug, narrow, repressive - Christianity dies a thousand deaths.

John Ortberg

#57. I predicted that if control of drugs were administered by law enforcement agencies, the result would be a black market more irrational and widespread than that of alcohol prohibition and the growth of enormous police-state repressive bureaucracy. And who, indeed, wanted that?

Timothy Leary

#58. While I'm optimistic about the direction the world is headed, generally, I think there is a need for constant vigilance and pressure on repressive governments.

Jimmy Wales

#59. All repressive laws must be revoked, and laws introduced to protect the rights of the people.

Aung San Suu Kyi

#60. Everything's so repressive now - it's the No generation. You can't do anything, you can't eat anything, you have to abstain.

Michael Douglas

#61. It is not far-fetched to draw a line from Operation Ajax through the Shah's repressive regime and the Islamic Revolution to the fireballs that engulfed the World Trade Center in New York.

Stephen Kinzer

#62. Satire must always accompany any free society. It is an absolute necessity. Even in the most repressive medieval kingdoms, they understood the need for the court jester, the one soul allowed to tell the truth through laughter,

Joe Randazzo

#63. The autocracies of the Arab world have been as economically destructive as they've been politically repressive.

James Surowiecki

#64. Repressive regimes do not endure change willingly - and Venezuela is no exception.

Leopoldo Lopez

#65. When they talk about family values, it's in a repressive way, as if our American tradition were only the Puritan tradition or the 19th century oppressive tradition. The Christian tradition.

James Hillman

#66. What we must eliminate are systems of representation that carry with them the authority which has become repressive because it doesn't permit or make room for interventions on the part of those represented.

Edward Said

#67. The federal government needs to get off the backs of small businesses and let the private sector grow and create jobs instead of harnessing it with onerous regulations and a repressive tax code.

Matt Salmon

#68. I'm really happy I went to a Catholic school because a lot of the repressive tactics they use make for great senses of humor.

Denis Leary

#69. Development requires major source of unfreedom: poverty as well as tyranny, poor economic opportunities as well as systematic social deprivation, neglect of public facilities as well as intolerance or overactivity of repressive states.

Amartya Sen

#70. I can honestly say I've never sold any arms to a repressive foreign regime while reassuring everyone at home that the weapons will be used for nice things.

Jo Brand

#71. It's a repressive society where you can't be horrible, I'm not horrible, they made me horrible, I'm just honest.

John Lydon

#72. I just think that unless you have that cohesiveness in the family unit, the male character tends to become very dominant, repressive and insensitive. So much of this comes also from a lack of education.

Ellen Johnson Sirleaf

#73. The more there are riots, the more repressive actin will take place, and the more we face the danger of a right-wing takeover and eventually a fascist society.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#74. In a repressive society, a writer can be deeply influential, but in a society that's filled with glut and repetition and endless consumption, the act of terror may be the only meaningful act.

Don DeLillo

#75. Organized religion is a very bad way of passing on spiritual values because it becomes so corrupted with political and repressive agendas which don't help anybody to develop their spirituality.

Jeanette Winterson

#76. Hope for some means its loss for others; when the hopeless regain some hope, those in power--the ones who had taken it away--become afraid, more protective of their endangered interests, more repressive.

Azar Nafisi

#77. Resentful of her own repressive Catholic upbringing, she'd avoided church altogether in her adult life, and now she was dying and I didn't even have God.

Cheryl Strayed

#78. The important question to ask is why these bodies are allowed to exist. If a country such as Spain allowed a repressive body like the Inquisition to exist for four hundred years, it is not because the Inquisition forced itself on the Spanish nation. It is because the Spaniards allowed it to exist.

Cullen Murphy

#79. The 'Islamic State', that strange miscegenation of Medina with Westphalia, is always in mortal danger of linking the moral austerity of monotheism with the repressive and supervisor powers of the modern nation state.

Abdal Hakim Murad

#80. By contrast, China is a repressive regime that denies its citizens the essential freedoms of religion, political dissent and representative self-government.

Todd Akin

#81. The truth is that the police reflect America in all of its will and fear, and whatever we might make of this country's criminal justice policy, it cannot be said that it was imposed by a repressive minority.

Ta-Nehisi Coates