Totalitarian System Quotes

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. People who live in the post-totalitarian system know only too well that the question of whether one or several political parties are in power, and how these parties define and label themselves, is of far less importance than the question of whether or not it is possible to live like a human being.

Vaclav Havel

#4. I have read somewhere that in a totalitarian system martyrdom does better than thought.

Vaclav Havel

#5. 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

#6. 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.

#7. 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

#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. 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

#10. Their true characters were shown not in the war they fought but in the peace they made.

Salman Rushdie

#11. Did life add to or take away from who we are at sixteen? The

Marybeth Mayhew Whalen

#12. I'm too comfortable to lift my head up right now, but just so you know, I'm rolling my eyes at your arrogance.

Kelly Oram

#13. 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

#14. 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

#15. A tax-supported, compulsory educational system is the complete model of the totalitarian state.

Isabel Paterson

#16. Self-discovery is life recovery.

Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha

#17. Every time you accept the claim that you can't change human nature or you have to accept the way the world is, you are accepting the foundations of the worldview that grounded the ancien regime.

Susan Neiman

#18. Our system, for readily apparent reasons, is far superior to those in nations, mostly totalitarian, which presume an arrested person is guilty and place the burden on the accused to prove his innocence.

Vincent Bugliosi

#19. There's a lot of good musicians who are unheard of. Get it down before they pass away.

Brownie McGhee

#20. 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

#21. 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