Totalitarianism Quotes

• Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state...

  Noam Chomsky

  Media, Political, Democracy

  "On Propaganda". WBAI Interview, chomsky.info. January 1992.

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• Totalitarianism, however, does not so much promise an age of faith as an age of schizophrenia. 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. Such a society, no matter how long it persists, can never afford to become either tolerant or intellectually stable.

  George Orwell

  Running, Past, Class

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• 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

  Doe, Violence, Firsts

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• 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

  Years, Realizing, Easy

  "Biography / Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• 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

  People, Insanity, Trying

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• The ultimate end of any ideology is totalitarianism.

  Tom Robbins

  Ends, Ideology, Ultimate

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• 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 the holy name of liberty or democracy?

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Inspirational, Peace, War

  Non-Violence in Peace and War (1942) vol. 1, ch. 142

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• Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.

  Aldous Huxley

  Freedom, Brave New World, Views

  Aldous Huxley (1950). “The Collected Works of Aldous Huxley: Brave new world”

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• 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

  Peace, Mean, Peculiar

  Hannah Arendt (1968). “Totalitarianism: Part Three of The Origins of Totalitarianism”, p.47, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Totalitarianism, if not fought against, could triumph anywhere.

  George Orwell

  Believe, Triumph, Ifs

  "Our job is to make life worth living, 1949-1950".

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• 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

  Momentum, Language, Propaganda

  Hannah Arendt (1968). “Totalitarianism: Part Three of The Origins of Totalitarianism”, p.63, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Remember what Hannah Arendt said when she was talking about fascism and totalitarianism. She said thoughtlessness is the essence of totalitarianism. So all of a sudden emotion becomes more important than reason. Ignorance becomes more important than justice. Injustice is looked over as simply something that happens on television. The spectacle of violence takes over everything.

  Henry Giroux

  Ignorance, Justice, Important

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• ...most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution.

  Aldous Huxley

  Dream, Growing Up, Future

  Aldous Huxley, Robert S. Baker, James Sexton (2002). “Complete Essays: 1956-1963, and supplement, 1920-1948”, Ivan R. Dee Publisher

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• Ask yourself why totalitarian dictatorships find it necessary to pour money and effort into propaganda for their own helpless, chained, gagged slaves, who have no means of protest or defense. The answer is that even the humblest peasant or the lowest savage would rise in blind rebellion, were he to realize that he is being immolated, not to some incomprehensible noble purpose, but to plain, naked human evil.

  Ayn Rand

  Mean, Tyrants, Evil

  Ayn Rand (1999). “Ayn Rand Reader”, p.136, Penguin

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• You and I are told we must choose between a left or right, but I suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down. Up to man's age-old dream -- the maximum of individual freedom consistent with order --or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism. Regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would sacrifice freedom for security have embarked on this downward path.

  Ronald Reagan

  Dream, Freedom, Sacrifice

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• Liberalism is totalitarianism with a human face.

  Thomas Sowell

  Faces, Conservative, Liberalism

  Thomas Sowell (2013). “Controversial Essays”, p.322, Hoover Press

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• The Western world generally has lost the concept of man as a creature made to the image and likeness of God, and reduced him either to a component part of the universe, to an economic animal or to a "physiological bag filled with psychological libido." Once man became materialized and atomized in Western thinking, it was only natural for a totalitarianism to arise to gather up the fragments into a new totality and substitute the collective man for the individual man who was isolated from all social responsibilities.

  Fulton J. Sheen

  Wisdom, Responsibility, Men

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• 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

  Atheist, Atheism, Stubborn

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• Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects... totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively than they could have by the most eloquent denunciations.

  Aldous Huxley

  Truth, Views, Silence

  Aldous Huxley (1950). “The Collected Works of Aldous Huxley: Brave new world”

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• Pure, hard-core liberals believe in a superior race. They think they're it. They believe they're more intelligent than the general run of mankind, better suited than the little people are to manage the little people's lives. They think they have the one true vision, the ability to solve all the moral dilemmas of the century. They prefer big government because that is the first step to totalitarianism, toward unquestioned rule by the elite. And of course they see themselves as the elite.

  Dean Koontz

  Running, Believe, Intelligent

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• 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

  Mean, Acceptance, Tolerance

  FaceBook post by Dennis Prager from Aug 27, 2013

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• If I lived in China or even Russia, or any totalitarian country, Maybe I could understand some of these illegal injunctions. ... But somewhere I read of the freedom of assembly. Somewhere I read of the freedom of speech. Somewhere I read of the freedom of the press. Somewhere I read that the greatness of America is the right to protest for right.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Country, Greatness, Russia

  I've Been to the Mountaintop, delivered 3 April 1968, Mason Temple (Church of God in Christ Headquarters), Memphis, Tennessee

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• Democracy's a very fragile thing. You have to take care of democracy. As soon as you stop being responsible to it and allow it to turn into scare tactics, it's no longer democracy, is it? It's something else. It may be an inch away from totalitarianism.

  Sam Shepard

  Scare Tactics, Democracy, May

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• Democracy is the opposite of totalitarianism, communism, fascism, or mobocracy.

  Frank Lloyd Wright

  Opposites, Democracy, Communism

  Frank Lloyd Wright (1995). “Frank Lloyd Wright Collected Writings: 1949-1959”, Rizzoli International Publications

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• I suspect that in our loathing of totalitarianism, there is infused a good deal of admiration for its efficiency.

  T. S. Eliot

  Loathing, Admiration, Efficiency

  T. S. Eliot (2014). “The Idea of a Christian Society”, p.14, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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