124 Quotes About Authoritarianism

30 or 40 of such voluntary gentlemen would do more in a day than 100 of the rest that must be press'd to it by compulsion.

I can never forgive evil and lying and cruel means, and still less can I forgive fanatics that use that for an excuse! If I may imitate Romain Rolland, a country that tolerates evil means — evil manners, standards of ethics — for a generation, will be so poisoned that it never will have any good end.

Self-sacrifice can sometimes be a well-honed weapon that the fanatic wields for destructive emotional purposes. Moreover, those who are eager to sacrifice themselves will not find it difficult to sacrifice others.

The people in their overwhelming majority are so feminine by nature and attitude that sober reasoning determines their thoughts and actions far less than emotion and feeling.And this sentiment is not complicated, but very simple and all of a piece. It does not have multiple shadings; it has a positive and a negative; love or hate, right or wrong, truth or lie, never half this way and half that way, never partially, or that kind of thing.

The courage of the authoritarian character is essentially a courage to suffer what fate or its personal representative or “leader” may have destined him for. To suffer without complaining is his highest virtue—not the courage of trying to end suffering or at least to diminish it. Not to change fate, but to submit to it, is the heroism of the authoritarian character.

It is a necessary condition of rationality that a man shall formulate his beliefs in such a way that it is clear what evidence would be evidence against them and that he shall lay himself open to criticism and refutation ... But to foreclose on tolerance is precisely to cut oneself off from such criticism and refutation. It is gravely to endanger one's own rationality by not admitting one's own fallibility.

When very complicated situations collapse into simple 'us versus them' problems, then certainty, hate, and escalatory spirals proliferate and become a driving force for perpetual conflict.

The means of defence against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home. Among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a war, whenever a revolt was apprehended. Throughout all Europe, the armies kept up under the pretext of defending, have enslaved the people.

The way things are supposed to work is that we're supposed to know virtually everything about what they [the government] do: that's why they're called public servants. They're supposed to know virtually nothing about what we do: that's why we're called private individuals.