Authoritarianism Quotes - Page 2

• We have power... Our power isn’t in a political system, or a religious system, or in an economic system, or in a military system; these are authoritarian systems... they have power... but it’s not reality. The power of our intelligence, individually or collectively IS the power; this is the power that any industrial ruling class truly fears: clear coherent human beings.

  John Trudell

  Religious, Military, Power

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• I think what we are confronting now is a new war of ideas. It's not communism versus capitalism, but it is authoritarianism versus democracy and representative government. And that is a threat that here in Europe, they feel acutely. They've seen their countries interfered with, bombarded by cyber-attacks, by Russian propaganda, indeed, by Russian troops.

  Adam Schiff

  Country, War, Thinking

  Source: abcnews.go.com

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• My personal credo as a libertarian conservative: I think all attempts to reform your fellow-citizens or tell them how to live their lives are arrogant and tyrannical. THAT'S why I oppose Leftism. I want people to be free to manage their own lives. Reform is just authoritarianism. People are not playthings for anybody's theories or obsessions.

  John Ray

  Thinking, People, Reform

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• No wonder psychedelics are threatening to an authoritarian religious hierarchy. You don’t need faith to benefit from a psychedelic experience, let alone a priest or even a shaman to interpret it. What you need is courage—courage to drink the brew, eat the mushroom, or whatever it is, and then to pay attention, and make of it what you will. Suddenly, the tools for direct contact with the transcendent other (whether you call it God or something else) is taken from the hands of an anointed elite and given to the individual seeker.

  Dennis McKenna

  Religious, Courage, Taken

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• Authority is God ordained, but authoritarianism and raw power, in almost all forms, is dangerous.

  James Dobson

  Inspirational Life, Authority, Form

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• I categorically deny that. The American left today as I know it - and believe me, I am very familiar with the American left - is going toward authoritarianism, toward totalitarianism. It's becoming the real right in the United States.

  Murray Bookchin

  Real, Believe, Today

  Source: reason.com

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• The pedagogy of authoritarianism is alive and well in the United States, and its repression of public memory takes place not only through the screen culture and institutional apparatuses of conformity, but is also reproduced through a culture of fear and a carceral state that imprisons more people than any other country in the world.

  Henry Giroux

  Country, Memories, People

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• In the '30s and '40s, the search for Hungarian national identity led famously to an alliance with Hitler and the destruction of more than a half million of the nation's Jews. And here we are now, more than 70 years later, witnessing a resurgence of xenophobia and authoritarianism, and not just in Eastern Europe.

  Susan Faludi

  Xenophobia, Years, Europe

  "Dear Susan, I Have Some Interesting News for You…". Interview With Marianne Szegedy-Maszak, www.motherjones.com. July 9, 2016.

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• But let it not be said that we did nothing. Let not those who love the power of the welfare/warfare state label the dissenters of authoritarianism as unpatriotic or uncaring. Patriotism is more closely linked to dissent than it is to conformity and a blind desire for safety and security. Understanding the magnificent rewards of a free society makes us unbashful in its promotion, fully realizing that maximum wealth is created and the greatest chance for peace comes from a society respectful of individual liberty.

  Ron Paul

  Safety, Understanding, Desire

  Congressional Record, Volume 153, pt. 10, 2010.

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• To demonize state authoritarianism while ignoring identical albeit contract-consecrated subservient arrangements in the large-scale corporations which control the world economy is fetishism at its worst.

  Bob Black

  World, Libertarian, Corporations

  Bob Black (1986). “The Abolition of Work and Other Essays”, Loompanics Unltd

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• If people want consultative government, the price is increased complexity and delay in arriving at decisions. If they want speed of government, then they must accept a greater degree of authoritarianism. I suspect that the real answer is that most people prefer the latter so long, that is, as government's decisions conform with their own views.

  John James Cowperthwaite

  Real, Government, Views

  Official Report of Proceedings of the Hong Kong Legislative Council (p. 215), March 27, 1968.

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• The practical reason for freedom is that freedom seems to be the only condition under which any kind of substantial moral fiber can be developed - we have tried law, compulsion and authoritarianism of various kinds, and the result is nothing to be proud of.

  Albert J. Nock

  Moral Fiber, Law, Proud

  "On Doing the Right Thing". "The American Mercury" Magazine, 1925.

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• It was with the last revolution and the coming of INGSOC (Inglish/English Socialism) that the latest High learnt how to keep their position permanently - by cultivating ignorance among the other classes and by constantly surveying them through the Thought Police. Part of this strategy included the maintenance of a state of continual warfare, which Goldstein discussed in the third chapter. The three major powers were not fighting this perpetual war for victory; they were fighting to keep a state of emergency always present as the surest guarantee of authoritarianism.

  George Orwell

  War, Ignorance, Fighting

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• Russia's inclination toward authoritarianism undoubtedly strengthened the leaders in Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Kazakhstan, as they are afraid of normal democratic procedures.

  Garry Kasparov

  Russia, Azerbaijan, Leader

  Source: www.rferl.org

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• You can't turn back technology and you can't turn back authoritarianism. You can't have one hand in the dirt and one hand in the crystal clear water and say that you're clean. That's just the way it is.

  El-P

  Technology, Hands, Water

  Source: www.complex.com

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• Poor minorities live in a new age of Jim Crow, one in which the ravages of segregation, racism, poverty and dashed hopes are amplified by the forces of privatization, financialization, militarization and criminalization, fashioning a new architecture of punishment, massive human suffering and authoritarianism.

  Henry Giroux

  Punishment, Racism, Crow

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• Teachers have been heroes to me, as well as artists and writers, and I'm honored to be among their ranks. There is always a lot of grousing about the academy. I suppose it comes from our all-American anti-authoritarianism.

  Alison Hawthorne Deming

  Teacher, Hero, Artist

  Interview with Simmons B. Buntin, www.terrain.org. September 22, 2010.

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• The knock on [Chris] Christie was always the I guy that he was - I felt inordinately talented politician, a smart and in some ways very capable human being, with a personality given toward authoritarianism and bullying and ethical corner-cutting.

  Chris Hayes

  Bullying, Smart, Cutting

  Source: www.msnbc.com

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• Even the most humane and compassionate of the monotheisms and polytheisms are complicit in this quiet and irrational authoritarianism: they proclaim us, in Fulke Greville's unforgettable line, "Created sick Commanded to be well." And there are totalitarian insinuations to back this up if its appeal should fail.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Sick, Lines, Quiet

  Christopher Hitchens (2009). “Letters to a Young Contrarian”, p.57, Basic Books

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• We see pluralism: We can see that there are different ideological and political positions in Russia. If the authoritarianism finally ends, we will have real competition.

  Nadezhda Tolokonnikova

  Real, Russia, Political

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• The libertarian can have no truck with 'left' or 'right' because he regrets any form of authoritarianism - the use of police force to control the creative life of man.

  Leonard Read

  Regret, Men, Creative

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• The use of the word royalty, as fee to a proprietor for the exploitation of a work or property, derives from the period when the sovereign assumed title to all wealth of the realm. It was the struggle for freedom from these encroachments of the state that chiefly marked the Nineteenth Century, and established everywhere constitutional regimes of limited authority. In the Twentieth Century, however, we have witnessed a gradual and almost unrestricted movement back to state authoritarianism, primarily in the economic sphere, accompanied by the spread of state monopoly and intervention.

  Elgin Groseclose

  Struggle, Sovereign, Spheres

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• We must move from ... the primacy of technology toward considerations of social justice and equity, from the dictates of organizational convenience toward the aspirations ofself realization and learning, from authoritarianism and dogmatism toward more participation, from uniformity and centralization toward diversity and pluralism, from the concept of work as hard and unavoidable, from life as nasty, brutish, and short toward work as purpose and self~fulfillment, a recognition of leisure as a valid activity in itself.

  Warren G. Bennis

  Moving, Technology, Justice

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• Confronted with the loving-sharing Consensus of subject-SUBJECT relationships all Authoritarianism must vanish. The Fairy Family Circle, co-joined in the shared vision of non-possessive love - which is the granting to any other and all others that total space wherein each may grow and soar to his own freely-selected, full potential - reaching out to one another subject-to-SUBJECT, becomes for the first time in history the true working model of a Sharing Consensus!

  Harry Hay

  Space, Circles, Vision

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• We must nevertheless present all possible interpretations for each observation, so that competing theories can be formulated and defended. In science, as elsewhere, intellectual inertia, the fashions of the moment, the weight of institutions, and authoritarianism are always to be feared. Heresies play an essential role by keeping our minds argumentative and alert.

  Hubert Reeves

  Fashion, Play, Intellectual

  "Atoms of Silence: an Exploration of Cosmic Evolution". Book by Hubert Reeves, 1984.

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