Authors:
  • The language of the totalist environment is characterized by the thought-terminating cliché. The most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed. These become the start and finish of any ideological analysis.

    Robert Jay Lifton (1989). “Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of "brainwashing" in China”, p.429, UNC Press Books