Totalitarian State Quotes

• A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.

  Aldous Huxley

  Powerful, Army, Brave New World

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

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• The difference between a welfare state and a totalitarian state is a matter of time.

  Ayn Rand

  Differences, Liberty, Matter

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• Taxation is the price we pay for failing to build a civilized society. The higher the tax level, the greater the failure. A centrally planned totalitarian state represents a complete defeat for the civilized world, while a totally voluntary society represents its ultimate success.

  Mark Skousen

  Failure, Pay, Ultimate Success

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• The great strength of the totalitarian state is that it forces those who fear it to imitate it.

  Adolf Hitler

  Fear, Political, Mein Kampf

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

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• 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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• In some states militant nationalism has gone to the lengths of dictatorship, the cult of the absolute or totalitarian state and the glorification of war.

  Arthur Henderson

  War, Gone, Length

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• A tax-supported, compulsory educational system is the complete model of the totalitarian state.

  Isabel Paterson

  Education, Historical, Liberty

  Isabel Paterson (1993). “God of the Machine”, p.258, Transaction Publishers

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• It is not true that virtually all news in a totalitarian state is false.

  Konrad Zuse

  News, States

  Konrad Zuse (2013). “The Computer - My Life”, p.55, Springer Science & Business Media

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• The greatest triumphs of propoganda have been accomplished, not by doing something, but by refraining from doing. Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.

  Aldous Huxley

  Brave New World, Views, Silence

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

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• Taxation is the price we pay for failing to build a civilized society. The higher the tax level, the greater the failure.

  Mark Skousen

  Taxation, Levels, Pay

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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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• Demoralize the enemy from within by surprise, terror, sabotage, assassination. This is the war of the future.

  Adolf Hitler

  Military, War, Enemy

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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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• The totalitarian states can do great things, but there is one thing they cannot do: they cannot give the factory-worker a rifle and tell him to take it home and keep it in his bedroom. That rifle, hanging on the wall of the working-class flat or laborer's cottage, is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there.

  George Orwell

  Jobs, Wall, Home

  George Orwell, Ian Angus, Sheila Davison (1998). “The Complete Works of George Orwell: A patriot after all, 1940-1941”

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• A new fascism promises security from the terror of crime. All that is required is that we take away the criminals' rights - which, of course, are our own. Out of our desperation and fear we begin to feel a sense of security from the new totalitarian state.

  Gerry Spence

  Rights, Tyrants, Promise

  Gerry Spence (1999). “Give Me Liberty: Freeing Ourselves in the Twenty-First Century”, p.408, Macmillan

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• Fundamentally, there are only two ways of coordinating the economic activities of millions. One is central direction involving the use of coercion - the technique of the army and of the modern totalitarian state. The other is voluntary cooperation of individuals - the technique of the marketplace.

  Milton Friedman

  Army, Two, Liberty

  Milton Friedman (2017). “Milton Friedman on Freedom: Selections from The Collected Works of Milton Friedman”, p.28, Hoover Press

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• As soon as government management begins it upsets the natural equilibrium of industrial relations, and each interference only requires further bureaucratic control until the end is the tyranny of the totalitarian state.

  Adam Smith

  Government, Upset, Management

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• Hamas is a terrorist organization dedicated to annihilating the Jewish state. It runs a theocratic totalitarian state in Gaza, with no individual liberty, and no freedom of speech or press.

  Dennis Prager

  Running, Organization, Freedom Of Speech

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• Who was I, really? I was the sole occupant of my mother's totalitarian state, my own personal history rewritten to fit the story she was telling that day. There were so many missing pieces. I was starting to find some of them, working my way upriver, collecting a secret cache of broken memories in a shoebox.

  Janet Fitch

  Mother, Memories, Broken

  Janet Fitch (2013). “White Oleander”, p.246, Hachette UK

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• But I was only a chaotic walker, nobody could stop me; even a totalitarian state was not able to control my daydreams, my poetic fascinations, the pattern of my walking.

  Adam Zagajewski

  Fascination, Patterns, Able

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• I am against revolution and am proud of it. Democracy cannot be created through revolutions. The most important dichotomy that I make for a society is between those who support democracy and human rights, and those who oppose it. In a totalitarian state, the state views any act of an individual to be political in nature. For example, the clothing that a person wears in a modern state is a private affair whereas in the Islamic Republic all women are forced to wear the hijab (Islamic attire). When women push their headscarf back an inch or two, this is interpreted to be a political act.

  Akbar Ganji

  Islamic, Rights, Views

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• Without freedom there will be no firearms among the people; without firearms among the people there will not long be freedom. Certainly there are examples of countries where the people remain relatively free after the people have been disarmed, but there are no examples of a totalitarian state being created or existing where the people have personal arms.

  Neal Knox

  Country, Gun, Long

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• Sooner or later a democracy which is to survive has to be able to rely upon that enlargement of vision and purpose of those individuals who compose it, which means that their craving for devotion and self-sacrifice is satisfied in a democratic society on a nobler level, and with a finer recognition of the value of individual personality than is true of a national purpose of a totalitarian state under a dictator.

  Ordway Tead

  Mean, Sacrifice, Self

  Attributed to Ordway Tead in "The Forbes scrapbook of Thoughts on the business of life", p. 138, 1950.

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• Of course, we knew that the official reports were sketchy, if not falsified. But, in terms of information theory, this is precisely where the problem lay: How were we to reconstruct reality from incomplete or false reports? It is not true that virtually all news in a totalitarian state is false. On the contrary, most news is completely correct, albeit tendentiously slanded; it is just that certain information is suppressed. One can adjust for the political slanting of the news, but there is virtually no way to fill in the omissions.

  Konrad Zuse

  Reality, Omission, Justice

  "The Computer - My Life".

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• If one holds these high principles clearly before one's eyes, and compares them with the life and spirit of our times, then it appears glaringly that civilized mankind finds itself at present in grave danger. In the totalitarian states it is the rulers themselves who strive actually to destroy that spirit of humanity. In less threatened parts it is nationalism and intolerance, as well as the oppression of the individuals by economic means, which threaten to choke these most precious traditions.

  Albert Einstein

  Religious, Mean, Eye

  Albert Einstein (2011). “Out of My Later Years: The Scientist, Philosopher, and Man Portrayed Through His Own Words”, p.21, Open Road Media

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