Top 100 Totalitarian Quotes
#1. As soon as government management begins it upsets the natural equilibrium of industrial relations, and each interference only requires further bureaucratic control until the end is the tyranny of the totalitarian state.
Adam Smith
#2. There is an absolutely fundamental hostility on the part of totalitarian regimes toward religion.
Jeane Kirkpatrick
#3. Top-down management is plan-based, hierarchical, and totalitarian. Bottom-up management is humane, consensual, and egalitarian. Effective
Philip Wik
#4. The only certainty we have is that those who are certain of a way to arrive at worldly salvation, are committed enough to organize around this, and seek power to enforce it, will invariably descend into a bloody totalitarian fascism.
Maajid Nawaz
#5. Nobody should have the right to eavesdrop, or you become a totalitarian state - the kind of state I escaped as a kid to come to this country where you have democracy and freedom of speech.
Jan Koum
#6. 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
#7. Culture's worth huge, huge risks. Without culture we're all totalitarian beasts.
Norman Mailer
#8. He said the reason we studied history was to find out why things were the way they were, how we got here. He said you could do anything you wanted to people who didn't know their history. That was the way a totalitarian system worked.
Janet Fitch
#9. More people have been killed by totalitarian regimes, during times of peace, than in all the wars in the world combined.
John Ringo
#10. In the West, you don't get in any trouble if you tell the truth, but you still can't do it. Not only can't you tell the truth, you can't think the truth. It's just so deeply embedded, deeply instilled, that without any meaningful coercion it comes out the same way it does in a totalitarian state.
Noam Chomsky
#11. Liberals and international diplomats (a distinction without a difference) have notorious difficulty understanding how to deal with totalitarian regimes.
Mona Charen
#12. In a jungle full of totalitarian monsters liberal democracy needs teeth.
Robert Conquest
#13. As the architects of Gilead knew, to institute an effective totalitarian system or indeed any system at all you must offer some benefits and freedoms, at least to a privileged few, in return for those you remove.
Margaret Atwood
#14. The more laws that governments pass, the less individual freedom there is. Any student of history will tell you that. Totalitarian countries ban pretty much everything.
Bill O'Reilly
#15. It is the low drive for sameness and the hatred of otherness that characterizes all forms of leftism, which inevitably are totalitarian ...
Erik Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn
#16. Intellectual and cultural freedom is the most important single precondition for the breakdown of the kinds of tyrannical and totalitarian systems that periodically threaten us.
James H. Billington
#17. Only religious fanatics and totalitarian states equate morality with legality.
Linus Torvalds
#18. And then, one morning, you're startled to discover that you no longer feel this terrible burden. What a surprise to notice that the angst has disappeared. Why on that particular day? Why not later, or sooner? It's the totalitarian decision of our body.
David Foenkinos
#19. 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
#20. The rule of clerics is totalitarian. It means people can't choose. Humanity is varied, and we should celebrate that instead of suppressing it.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#21. I ask you to forgive me for not fulfilling some hopes of those people who believed that we would be able to jump from the totalitarian past into a bright, rich and civilized future in one go.
Boris Yeltsin
#22. The nightmare in every democracy, the very nightmare, is if it gets worse and worse and worse, we could end up totalitarian.
Norman Mailer
#23. The moral consequences of totalitarian propaganda ... are destructive of all morals because they undermind one of the foundations of all morals: the sense of and respect for truth.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#25. James: And I take back what I said about you being totalitarian.
Lucy: It's about time. That term doesn't really suit me.
James: I know. You like flirting too much.
Lucy: Totalitarians aren't flirts?
James: Historically speaking, no.
Kristen Tracy
#26. Islam, or any religion, will become totalitarian if it is made into an ideology, because that is the nature of ideologies.
Abdolkarim Soroush
#27. The totalitarian attempt at global conquest and total domination has been the destructive way out of all impasses. Its victory may coincide with the destruction of humanity; wherever it has ruled, it has begun to destroy the essence of man.
Hannah Arendt
#28. All over the world today, not just in the totalitarian countries, assiduous functionaries in Ministries of Truth are clubbing history dumb and rendering language insensible.
E.L. Doctorow
#29. The opposite of Nazi is neither Republican nor Democrat, conservative or liberal. Totalitarianism's diametric opposite of is Libertarianism.
A.E. Samaan
#30. He realized that trust between people is what makes us happy. Any totalitarian state is based on betrayal. It needs people to inform on each other, to avoid socializing to interact only through the state and to avoid unsanctioned meetings.
Oliver Bullough
#31. The term "totalitarian" was derived from Adolf Hitler's "Total State", which was a "craddle to grave" solution that sought to micro-manage all aspects of humanity.
A.E. Samaan
#32. These people don't see that if you encourage totalitarian methods, the time may come when they will be used against you instead of for you.
George Orwell
#33. The seeds of totalitarian regimes are nurtured by misery and want.
Harry S. Truman
#34. I myself was to experience how easily one is taken in by a lying and censored press and radio in a totalitarian state ... a steady diet over the years of falsifications and distortions made a certain impression on one's mind and often misled it.
William L. Shirer
#35. If a dictator takes up my ideas, the resulting town will survive the political system that commissioned it and stand as a social good. Besides, modernism rather than classicism has dominated the architecture of totalitarian regimes of both the left and right.
Leon Krier
#36. The totalitarian phenomenon is not to be understood without making an allowance for the thesis that some important part of every society consists of people who actively want tyranny: either to exercise it themselves or - much more mysteriously - to submit to it.
Jean Francois Revel
#37. I love talking about Kennedy assassination ... a great archetypal example of how totalitarian government ... sorry, wrong meeting.
Bill Hicks
#38. In the main the Academy helped to frame only laws of an economic or social nature, since owing to the development of the totalitarian regime it became more and more impossible to cooperate in other spheres.
Hans Frank
#39. For the totalitarian mind, adherence to state propaganda does not suffice: one must display proper enthusiasm while marching in the parade.
Noam Chomsky
#40. Seventy years ago this November, Vladimir Lenin created the modern totalitarian state, transforming simpler forms of tyranny into history's most sophisticated apparatus of rule by terror.
Michael Johns
#41. From the point of view of fundamental human liberties there is little to choose between communism, socialism, and national socialism. They all are examples of the collectivist or totalitarian state ...
Friedrich Hayek
#42. Socialism is "group-think." How uninformed in history do you have to be to advocate for "group-think"??
A.E. Samaan
#43. Truth has been relegated to subjectivity; beauty has been subjugated to the beholder; and as millions are idiotized night after night, a global commune has been constructed with the arts enjoying a totalitarian rule.
Ravi Zacharias
#44. A totalitarian regime thus has one political party, one educational system, one artistic creed, one centrally planned economy, one unified media, and one moral code. In a totalitarian state there are no independent schools, no private businesses, no grassroots organizations, and no critical thought.
Anne Applebaum
#45. 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
#46. If we do not try harder to remember the history of the other half of the European continent, the history of the other twentieth-century totalitarian regime, in the end it is we in the West who will not understand our past, we who will not know how our world came to be the way it is. And
Anne Applebaum
#47. The attempt to politicize everything is the destruction of politics. When everything is seen as relevant to politics, than politics has in fact become totalitarian.
Bernard Crick
#48. Anti-Americanism is a pure totalitarian concept. The very notion is idiotic.
Noam Chomsky
#49. The totalitarian state is not a force unleashed, the truth is in chains.
Bernard-Henri Levy
#50. We invaded Iraq to change a totalitarian, despotic regime, and we have been successful there.
Judd Gregg
#51. The fact is ... that when totalitarian nations like China and Saudi Arabia play ball with U.S. business interests, we like them just fine. But when Venezuela's freely elected president threatens powerful corporate interests, the Bush administration treats him as an enemy.
Robert Scheer
#52. Technological rationality reveals its political character as it becomes the great vehicle of better domination, creating a truely totalitarian universe in which society and nature, mind and body are kept in a state of permanent mobilization for the defense of this universe.
Herbert Marcuse
#53. A pastor who lived through the Third Reich described his meetings with Nazi officials in a way that illuminates life in totalitarian societies: "[O]ne would be pushed further, step by step, until he had crossed over the line, without noticing that his spine was being bent millimeter by millimeter.
Randall L. Bytwerk
#54. Without criticism of Islam, Islam will remain unassailed in its dogmatic, fanatical, medieval fortress; ossified, totalitarian and intolerant. It will continue to stifle thought, human rights, individuality, originality and truth.
Wafa Sultan
#55. The 'deep' civic function of the humanities ... is something understood very well by totalitarian societies, which tend to keep close tabs on them, and to circumscribe them in direct proportion to how stringently the population is controlled.
Mark Slouka
#56. For all their faults, right-wing authoritarian regimes more easily accept democratic reforms than left-wing totalitarian states.
Jeane Kirkpatrick
#57. I cannot say that our country could have no secret police without becoming totalitarian, but I can say with great conviction that it cannot become totalitarian without a centralized national police.
Robert H. Jackson
#58. Government does not cause affluence. Citizens of totalitarian countries have plenty of government and nothing of anything else.
P. J. O'Rourke
#59. The modern State, whether in a totalitarian or a democratic country, has far too much power, and we are probably right to fear it.
Anthony Burgess
#60. 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
#61. There must be no worse punishment to a totalitarian nation than the withdrawal of capital.
Jerzy Kosinski
#62. You can build the Empire State Building. Train the Prussian army. Elevate the hierarchy of a totalitarian state higher than the throne of the Most High.
But there are still people whose moral superiority defeats your own.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#63. 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
#64. The bulk of the totalitarian-minded in the democratic societies are men and women who are attracted to this destructive way of life for inner emotional reasons unknown to themselves.
Joost Meerloo
#65. The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.
Hannah Arendt
#66. In some states militant nationalism has gone to the lengths of dictatorship, the cult of the absolute or totalitarian state and the glorification of war.
Arthur Henderson
#67. A new fascism promises security from the terror of crime. All that is required is that we take away the criminals' rights - which, of course, are our own. Out of our desperation and fear we begin to feel a sense of security from the new totalitarian state.
Gerry Spence
#68. 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
#69. I've always been fascinated by totalitarian regimes. I'm not an admirer of them.
Sue Townsend
#70. I think in space or music or art or literature of any kind there has to be some kind of void where the viewer or the spectator or the listener or the reader can insert themselves into it, and there is a certain kind of architectural space which is totalitarian, which does not allow you to do that.
Jonathan Meades
#71. A "centrally planned economy" by definition discourages and despises participation by the masses. It's a bureaucratic oligarchy.
A.E. Samaan
#72. A totalitarian system leaves behind it a minefield built into both the country's social structure and the individual psychology of its citizens. And mines explode each time the system faces the danger of being dismantled and the country sees the prospect of genuine renewal.
Anatoly Sobchak
#73. I've been fascinated by Machiavelli since I was very young. I've always felt that he had a bad rap from history, and that he was actually a person quite unlike what we now think of as Machiavellian. He was a republican. He disliked totalitarian government.
Salman Rushdie
#74. 20th-century totalitarian movements were no more defined by a rejection of Judeo-Christianity than they were defined by a rejection of astrology, alchemy, Confucianism, Scientology, or any of hundreds of other belief systems.
Steven Pinker
#75. Human kindness is deeply subversive to totalitarian creeds, which seek to thwart all compassion toward those deemed unworthy of moral consideration, those branded as internal or external enemies.
Chris Hedges
#76. So many people who wanted no part of all this. That's what's new. There used to be the option of opting out. But now that's over. Completion is the end. We're closing the circle around everyone - it's a totalitarian nightmare.
Dave Eggers
#77. It's a mistake to blame Islam, a religion 14 centuries old, for the evil that should be ascribed to militant Islam, a totalitarian ideology less than a century old. Militant Islam is the problem, but moderate Islam is the solution.
Daniel Pipes
#78. The greatest threat to mankind and civilization is the spread of the totalitarian philosophy. Its best ally is not the devotion of its followers but the confusion of its enemies. To fight it, we must understand it.
Ayn Rand
#79. There is no doubt that the second President Bush inherited a very serious terrorist threat, though not such a threat as had been represented by the totalitarian Great Powers, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.
Conrad Black
#80. Nowadays we would perhaps call Plato's state totalitarian.
Jostein Gaarder
#81. Journalism is the protection between people and any sort of totalitarian rule. That's why my hero, admittedly a flawed one, is a journalist.
Andrew Vachss
#82. In 1951, Air Scoop published a long list of organizations that the government had labeled totalitarian, Communist, or subversive, the clear message that affiliation with any of them might jeopardize one's job.
Margot Lee Shetterly
#83. We can see after 200+ years that the American model failed. It is not limited. It is totalitarian. And getting worse.
Wendy McElroy
#84. 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
#85. The outstanding negative quality of the totalitarian elite is that it never stops to think about the world as it really is and never compares the lies with reality.
Hannah Arendt
#86. America's strength lies not in its one-ness, but in its diversity of beliefs and efforts. And it will take all our strength in the coming years to combat global warming alarmism and to keep America from falling into the totalitarian green abyss.
Steven Milloy
#87. Communism is what happens when Socialists realize that they want complete control over every aspect of human life.
A.E. Samaan
#88. We, as citizens or members of people's organisations, can preserve and nourish basic principles needed for long-term efforts aimed at transforming a totalitarian and war-torn society into a democratic one.
Katarina Kruhonja
#89. The sign of a truly totalitarian culture is that important truths simply lack cognitive meaning and are interpretable only at the level of 'Fuck You', so they can then elicit a perfectly predictable torrent of abuse in response. We've long ago reached that level.
Noam Chomsky
#90. So I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterward you went about as numb as a slave in a totalitarian state.
Sylvia Plath
#91. Dominion is a spy novel, a love story, and also I hope gives some sense of the difficulties faced by dissidents under any totalitarian regime: the threat of imprisonment, torture and death; the threat to one's family, the terror of being alone in a hostile world.
C.J. Sansom
#92. Orwell's '1984' convinced me, rightly or wrongly, that Marxism was only a quantum leap away from tyranny. By contrast, Huxley's 'Brave New World' suggested that the totalitarian systems of the future might be subservient and ingratiating.
J.G. Ballard
#93. Is privacy about government security agents decrypting your e-mail and then kicking down the front door with their jackboots? Or is it about telemarketers interrupting your supper with cold calls? It depends. Mainly, of course, it depends on whether you live in a totalitarian or a free society.
James Gleick
#94. In order to establish a totalitarian regime, terror must be presented as an instrument for carrying out a specific ideology; and that ideology must have won the adherence of many, and even a majority, before terror can be stabilized.
Hannah Arendt
#95. The history of the twentieth century was dominated by the struggle against totalitarian systems of state power. The twenty-first will no doubt be marked by a struggle to curtail excessive corporate power.
Eric Schlosser
#96. A totalitarian dictatorship cannot explain; it can only suppress.
Robert Payne
#97. If you say to people that they, as a matter of fact, can't protect their conversations, in particular their political conversations, I think you take a long step toward making a transition from a free society to a totalitarian society.
Whitfield Diffie
#98. What's certain is that a totalitarian enclave like Cuba's can't continue to exist, so change will definitely come there, eventually.
Vaclav Havel
#99. 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
#100. Totalitarian states killed with impunity and no one was held accountable. That didn't happen in the West.
John Le Carre
