187 Quotes About Totalitarianism

This collaboration between global technology companies and the state is enabling a worrying level of draconian oversight into our everyday lives, providing those who wish to control us with the tools to identify, intimidate and incarcerate any wrong-thinkers. Once again, those who deem themselves the most virtuous have little qualms about imposing their virtue onto others by restricting their rights – only this time they are backed up by some seriously powerful technological hardware.

The ‘lump of equality’ argument, which assumes that if someone is doing well it must be at the expense of someone else, is both false and has been used to previously justify some pretty dystopian actions. When those with power believe that the end justifies the means, any action to achieve this end becomes viable. We’ve seen multiple variations of ideology-based ‘equality’ solutions implemented in the real world; none of which turned out well for those they purported to help.

A nationalist...is not at all the same thing as a patriot. A nationalist encourages us to be our worst, and then tells us that we are the best.

For it is evident that those who regard the whole earth as their future territory will stress the organ of domestic violence and will rule conquered territory with police methods and personnel rather than with the army.

What makes men obey or tolerate real power and, on the other hand, hate people who have wealth without power, is the rational instinct that power has a certain function and is of some general use.

… the Nazis, without admitting it, learned as much from American gangster organizations as their propaganda, admittedly, learned from American business publicity.

Am I racially kin to this man? Baynes wondered. So closely so that for all intents and purposes it is the same? Then it is in me, too, the psychotic streak. A psychotic world we live in. The madmen are in power. How long have we known this? Faced this? And—how many of us do know it?

Nos instruyen y preparan en la juventud para una profesión, para cumplir los deberes ciudadanos, para el servicio militar, nos enseñaban las reglas del aseo, a comportarnos bien y hasta a comprender lo bello (esto último no tanto). Pero la instrucción, la educación, la experiencia, no nos preparan en absoluto para la gran prueba de nuestra vida: para el arresto por nada y para el sumario sobre nada.

Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.