Top 100 Totalitarian Quotes
#1. Advances in the technology of telecommunications have proved an unambiguous threat to totalitarian regimes everywhere.
Rupert Murdoch
#2. 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
#3. But even the Four Horsemen of Kidporn, Dope Dealers, Mafia and Terrorists don't worry me as much as totalitarian governments. It's been a long century, and we've had enough of them.
Bruce Sterling
#5. Corporation: a miniature totalitarian state governed by a hierarchy of unelected officials who take a dim view of individualism, free speech, equality and eggheads. The backbone of all Western democracies.
Rick Bayan
#6. The problem with American democracy is the American corporation, which is a slave holder construct, pure and simple. It's totally invasive, and people are as tightly controlled within the walls of a corporation as they are in a totalitarian society.
Richard Grossman
#7. The difference between a welfare state and a totalitarian state is a matter of time.
Ayn Rand
#8. If it turns out that President Barack Obama can make a deal with the most intransigent, hard-line, unreasonable, totalitarian mullahs in the world but not with Republicans? Maybe he's not the problem.
Jon Stewart
#9. Millions of people died in the war "to make the world safe for democracy" - a war that led to autocratic dynasties being replaced by totalitarian dictatorships that slaughtered far more of their own people than the dynasties had?
Thomas Sowell
#10. There were strict laws protecting card privacy but laws had a bad habit of being ignored or abrogated when societal push came to totalitarian shove.
Dan Simmons
#11. I am no apologist for Fidel's [Castro] regime. It is, after all, a totalitarian regime. So I would like to see that change.
John Gimlette
#12. The biggest crime in Nabokov's 'Lolita' is imposing your own dream upon someone else's reality. Humbert Humbert is blind. He doesn't see Lolita's reality. He doesn't see that Lolita should leave. He only sees Lolita as an extension of his own obsession. This is what a totalitarian state does.
Azar Nafisi
#13. A tax-supported, compulsory educational system is the complete model of the totalitarian state.
Isabel Paterson
#14. Identity without democracy is totalitarian; democracy without identity is weak and self-betraying.
Dennis Prager
#15. Other words used in variable meanings, in most cases more or less dishonestly, are: class, totalitarian, science, progressive, reactionary, bourgeois, equality. Now
George Orwell
#16. Our focus needs to be on freeing dissidents and continuing to support the opposition movement within Cuba - not rewarding Castro and subsidizing and strengthening his totalitarian regime.
Mel Martinez
#17. Where else, in a non-totalitarian country, but in the political profession is the individual expected to sacrifice all-including his own career-for the national good?
John F. Kennedy
#18. The Cuban people still live in constant fear of a brutal totalitarian regime that has demonstrated time and again its utter disregard for basic human dignity. The fight for a free Cuba has gone on for far too long.
Mitt Romney
#19. Of course, man is also a weak creature with many bad qualities. And it depends on which of his qualities will in a certain social situation and in a certain climate prevail, which qualities will awaken. The totalitarian system was masterful in how it managed to mobilize all the bad qualities.
Judy Woodruff
#20. Since Americans are by nature individualistic and entrepreneurial, by definition, then, the socialist program is anti-American, to say nothing of totalitarian. Socialism is an old dream. Some dreams are nightmares when put into practice.
Ben Carson
#21. Ideology on which the Kyoto Protocol is based, is a new form of totalitarian ideology, along with Marxism, Communism and socialism.
Andrey Illarionov
#22. Totalitarian solutions may well survive the fall of totalitarian regimes in the form of strong temptations which will come up whenever it seems impossible to alleviate political, social, or economic misery in a manner worthy of man.
Hannah Arendt
#23. A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.
Aldous Huxley
#24. It became clear to the whole world that a totalitarian regime could neither accuse nor transform itself: suicide was not in its nature, it could only kill others.
Svetlana Alliluyeva
#25. Ethical obligation has to subordinate itself to the totalitarian nature of war.
Karl Brandt
#26. Totalitarian rule marks the sharpest contrast imaginable with political rule, and ideological thinking is an explicit and direct challenge to political thinking.
Bernard Crick
#27. In the realm of totalitarian kitsch, all answers are given in advance and preclude any questions.
Milan Kundera
#28. It is hard, I submit, to loathe bloodshed, including war, more than I do, but it is still harder to exceed my loathing of the very nature of totalitarian states in which massacre is only an administrative detail.
Vladimir Nabokov
#29. I used to call myself a single-issue voter on the essential question of defending civilization against its terrorist enemies and their totalitarian protectors, and on that 'issue' I hope I can continue to expose and oppose any ambiguity.
Christopher Hitchens
#30. Any doctrine that weakens personal responsibility for judgment and for action helps create the attitudes that welcome and support the totalitarian state.
John Dewey
#31. I don't like the sort of hierarchical, totalitarian type of room a lot of directors can find themselves in.
Adam Rapp
#32. After all, from the Muslim Brotherhood's inception in Egypt in 1928, it has been a revolutionary organization committed to the imposition worldwide of a totalitarian, supremacist Islamic doctrine they call shariah.
Frank Gaffney
#33. What can prevent the coming of totalitarian socialism is only a thorough change in ideologies. What we need is an open positive endorsement of that system to which we owe all the wealth that distinguished our age from the conditions of ages gone by.
Ludwig Von Mises
#34. Totalitarian states use propaganda to orchestrate historical amnesia, a state-induced stupidity. The object is to make sure the populace does not remember what it means to be free. And once a population does not remember what it means to be free, it does not react when freedom is stripped from it.
Chris Hedges
#35. 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
#36. To be sure, totalitarian dictators do not consciously embark upon the road to insanity. The
Hannah Arendt
#37. A free society is regarded as one that does not engage, on principle, in attempting to control what people find meaningful, and a totalitarian society is regarded as one that does, on principle, attempt such control.
Michael Polanyi
#38. Although the notion of one god may give comfort to those in need of a daddy, it reminds the rest of us that the totalitarian society is grounded upon the concept of God the father. One paternal god, one paternal leader. Authority is absolute.
Gore Vidal
#39. I was born too late to have any temptation with communism, or at least Soviet-type communism. Travelling in Eastern Europe and the ex-Soviet Union, you clearly don't want to defend a system that would have empty shops and a totalitarian regime and internal passports.
Thomas Piketty
#40. The chief difference [between totalitarian and free countries] is that only the totalitarians appear clearly to know how they want to achieve that result, while the free world has only its past achievements to show, being by its very nature unable to offer any detailed "plan" for further growth.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#41. If small business goes, big business does not have any future except to become the economic arm of a totalitarian state.
Philip D. Reed
#42. In general, literature is a natural adversary of totalitarianism. Tyrannical governments all view literature in the same way: as their enemy. I lived for a long time in a totalitarian state, and I know firsthand that horror.
Ismail Kadare
#43. The post-totalitarian malady has taken its most acute form in Romania. And it has taken place for very specific reasons. The repression here has been more cruel, more brutal, than in other states caught in the inferno of a 'socialist paradise.'
Octavian Paler
#44. The great strength of the totalitarian state is that it forces those who fear it to imitate it.
Adolf Hitler
#45. That Massachusetts Bay Colony had been set up in England as a corporation, enabling one hundred white male religious fanatics to elect their leader to rule in a completely totalitarian way.
Larry Kramer
#46. We should teach general ethics to both men and women, but sexual relationships themselves must not be policed. Sex, like the city streets, would be risk-free only in totalitarian regimes.
Camille Paglia
#47. Using the market to gradually fix a totalitarian government is like making a pot of tea by running a volcano through a glacier.
Clay Shirky
#48. In any nation in which people's rights have been subordinated to the rights of the few, in any totalitarian nation, the first institution to be dismantled is the jury. I was, I am, afraid.
Gerry Spence
#49. For the Fascist, everything is the State, and nothing human or spiritual exists, much less has value, outside the State. In this sense Fascism is totalitarian.
Benito Mussolini
#50. In the Middle Ages, the Roman Catholic papacy developed into an abusive, corrupt, autocratic, totalitarian system by claiming apostolic authority through a supposed line of succession back to Peter.
John F. MacArthur Jr.
#51. Short-sighted and impatient efforts to wipe out poverty by severing the connection between effort and reward can only lead to the growth of a totalitarian state, and destroy the economic progress that this country has so dearly bought.
Henry Hazlitt
#52. If someone thinks I'm a dickhead, fine, listen to someone else's record, then. We're not a totalitarian regime; no one's forced to listen to Coldplay. It's actually quite a compliment if you're something that people can stand against.
Chris Martin
#53. There is danger that totalitarian governments, not subject to vigorous popular debate, will underestimate the will and unity of democratic societies where vital interests are concerned.
John F. Kennedy
#54. I have lived under totalitarian Communism, so I prize freedom as much as anyone and have long fought for freedom of conscience and speech.
Os Guinness
#55. By disobeying god, we escape from his totalitarian prison where you cannot ask any questions, where you must never question authority. We become our human selves,
Ann Druyan
#56. It is vain to fight totalitarianism by adopting totalitarian methods. Freedom can only be won by men unconditionally committed to the principles of freedom. The first requisite for a better social order is the return to unrestricted freedom of thought and speech.
Ludwig Von Mises
#57. But in practice master plans fail - because they create totalitarian order, not organic order. They are too rigid; they cannot easily adapt to the natural and unpredictable changes that inevitably arise in the life of a community.
Christopher Alexander
#58. But if we had to trade with a Europe dominated by the present German trade policies, we might have to change our methods to some totalitarian form. This is a prospect that any lover of democracy must view with consternation.
Wendell Willkie
#59. The United States of America took a giant step toward a totalitarian socialist government when the Supreme Court voted to uphold Obamacare, allowing the individual mandate for the government to force American citizens to buy health insurance whether they want to or not.
Charlie Daniels
#60. The best way to defeat the totalitarian of hate is with an ideology of hope
an ideology of hate
excuse me
with an ideology of hope.
George W. Bush
#61. I would be opposed to any kind of totalitarian control.
B.F. Skinner
#62. The savior who wants to turn men into angels is as much a hater of human nature as the totalitarian despot who wants to turn them into puppets.
Eric Hoffer
#63. Those who rebelled against totalitarian rule and those who simply managed to remain themselves and think freely, were all persecuted. We should not forget any of those who paid for our present freedom in one way or another.
Vaclav Havel
#64. History has shown more than once that when people surrender totalitarian powers to their rulers, they are inevitably exercised in the next big crisis. And let's not forget here that the next president who wields this power and who will be in charge of military might well be Hillary Clinton.
Jacob G. Hornberger
#65. A just society will appear less spectacular, and less clearly defined, than a society with totalitarian leadership, theocratic goals.
B.W. Powe
#66. Taxation is the price we pay for failing to build a civilized society. The higher the tax level, the greater the failure. A centrally planned totalitarian state represents a complete defeat for the civilized world, while a totally voluntary society represents its ultimate success.
Mark Skousen
#67. Democratic Socialism devolves into totalitarian Socialism and eventually into full on Communism as people resist statism.
A.E. Samaan
#68. The real stumbling-block of totalitarian regimes is not the spiritual need of men for freedom of thought; it is men's inability to stand the physical and nervous strain of a permanent state of excitement, except during a few years of their youth.
Simone Weil
#69. We lived in a totalitarian system for more than 70 years, and our views are still under its influence. Many heads of state in the former Soviet republics believe that they must have total power.
Irakli Okruashvili
#70. As a child I perceived violence as a sort of natural law. In the totalitarian Soviet Union, oppression held everything together. It was the sinister energy of our country.
Vladimir Sorokin
#71. The totalitarian toil-state originates in the propertylessness of the majority.
Louis O. Kelso
#73. Only the freedom of mind can prevent the state from becoming totalitarian and from issuing totalitarian demands.
Friedrich Durrenmatt
#74. As the writer of the lyric of the song 'God's Country', I am outraged by the suggestion that somehow I am connected with, believe in, or am sympathetic with Communist or totalitarian philosophy.
Yip Harburg
#75. The fundamental basis of this nation's laws was given to Moses on the Mount ... If we don't have a proper fundamental moral background, we will finally end up with a totalitarian government which does not believe in rights for anybody except the State.
Harry Truman
#76. True goal of totalitarian propaganda is not persuasion, but organization of the polity. ... What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part.
Hannah Arendt
#77. 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 judgement of his peers is in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all totalitarian government whether Nazi or Communist.
Winston S. Churchill
#78. Every totalitarian Communist considered themselves as a Socialist first and foremost.
A.E. Samaan
#79. Fifty-one percent of a nation can establish a totalitarian regime, suppress minorities and still remain democratic.
Erik Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn
#80. I agree with Abhijit Naskar that the path of tolerance is the only way - but it must be accompanied by continued pressure to break down barriers to access to information, so that our tolerance isn't exploited to further the ends of totalitarian religious groups.
Daniel C. Dennett
#81. Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.
Noam Chomsky
#82. While an equality of rights under a limited government is possible and an essential condition of individual freedom, a claim for equality of material position can be met only by a government with totalitarian powers.
Friedrich Hayek
#83. That's right. Five minutes into the all-hands meeting, the fundamental values of this totalitarian society had received the support of the vast majority of the crew. So, let me tell you, when humans are lost in space, it takes only five minutes to reach totalitarianism. Boris
Liu Cixin
#84. Hamas is a terrorist organization dedicated to annihilating the Jewish state. It runs a theocratic totalitarian state in Gaza, with no individual liberty, and no freedom of speech or press.
Dennis Prager
#85. The truth is, it's a totalitarian dictatorship when you're making films. You are the boss. You can listen to other people, and it can be a benevolent dictatorship, but it's a dictatorship nonetheless. A lot of directors go past their first experience, that's what they've come away with.
Chiwetel Ejiofor
#86. 'Hunger Games' is a tried-and-true tale about a totalitarian society. It's more similar to China than America, but it's also similar to Nazi Germany and anywhere where the populace gets semi-brainwashed into serving the agenda of a very few.
Elizabeth Banks
#87. Violence, of course, is generally associated with frankly totalitarian forms of anti-political utopianism like Communism, but the Second World War shows that liberal universalists are as capable of violence as Communists. They are just less capable of honesty.
Greg Johnson
#88. The richness of our contemporary visual world must be seen as a danger. It is an overwhelming and oppressive world. A world that manifests itself fundamentally through the image is only a few steps from totalitarian manipulation.
Edmundo Desnoes
#89. As I understand I took most so-called democratic states about 200 years on average to build their democracies. That is why, when we go to sleep under totalitarian rule and wake up in a democracy, it makes me laugh.
Aleksandr Lebed
#90. I regret having to play the role of Cassandra once more and having to disappoint the fresh hopes of certain ever hopeful colleagues, but there is no possible evolution in a totalitarian society.
Albert Camus
#91. A new breeze is blowing, and a world refreshed by freedom seems reborn; for in man's heart, if not in fact, the day of the dictator is over. The totalitarian era is passing, its old ideas blown away like leaves from an ancient, lifeless tree.
George H. W. Bush
#92. Such an atmosphere is un-American, the most un-American thing we have to contend with today. It is the climate of a totalitarian country in which scientists are expected to change their theories to match changes in the police state's propaganda line.
Harry S. Truman
#93. Long-established totalitarian governments fear any kind of free expression. A sculpture can be a manifesto, a manuscripted adventure can double as a cry for rebellion.
Alan Dean Foster
#94. Calls for the simplification of abstract or allusive art have always come from governments suspicious of artists themselves. This is why totalitarian regimes have always legislated some form of realism.
Russell Smith
#95. The history of totalitarian regimes is reflected in the evolution and perfection of the instruments of terror and more especially the police.
Carl Joachim Friedrich
#96. Any approach to scientific inference which seeks to legitimize it and answer in reponse to complex uncertainty is, for me, a totalitarian parody of a would-be rational learning process.
Adrian Smith
#97. The Chinese art world does not exist. In a society that restricts individual freedoms and violates human rights, anything that calls itself creative or independent is a pretence. It is impossible for a totalitarian society to create anything with passion and imagination.
Ai Weiwei
#98. i am awake only in what i love & desire to the point of terror -- everything else is just shrouded furniture, quotidian anaesthesia, shit-for-brains, sub-reptilian ennui of totalitarian regimes, banal censorship & useless pain ...
Hakim Bey
#99. The history of psychiatry rewrites itself so often that it almost resembles the self-serving chronicles of a totalitarian and slightly paranoid regime.
J.G. Ballard
#100. Teilhard merely seems to set the problem of man, as the utopian sees it, on lofty heights; yet, hi terminology, which mixes archeology, sociology, biology, astronomy, and a vulgarized theology, can, in fact, be translated at every turn into the language of collectivism and of totalitarian polices.
Thomas Molnar
