Totalitarianism Quotes - Page 5

• Totalitarianism is neither left nor right, and within its empire both will perish. I was never a believer, but after seeing Czech Catholics persecuted during the Stalinist terror, I felt the deepest solidarity with them. What separated us, the belief in God, was secondary to what united us. In Prague, they hanged the Socialists and the priests. Thus a fraternity of the hanged was born.

  Milan Kundera

  Catholic, Prague, Empires

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• There is a good deal of art that in some traditions of conceptual work are anti-affect, in fact a very large chunk of mainstream art after 1950 took against affect art altogether because they said, "No, we hate affect art because this is how we get manipulated by totalitarianism and therefore artists shouldn't play that game." And a lot of artists agreed to play that game, which I personally believe is to the loss of art.

  Laura Belem

  Art, Hate, Believe

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

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• [Albert Camus] always held a profound commitment [engagement], a real resistance to all totalitarianism.

  Catherine Camus

  Real, Commitment, Profound

  Source: www.spikemagazine.com

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• As we know, the balance of the economy of the world, the proportion is crazy. People are probably looking for a balance. The nature pushes people to move from poor and mentally and economically demolished places, from totalitarianism, to places that offer them much more than the fear.

  Pawel Althamer

  Crazy, Moving, People

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Yet optimism is in order, because day by day democracy is proving itself to be a not-at-all-fragile flower. From Stettin on the Baltic to Varna on the Black Sea, the regimes planted by totalitarianism have had more than 30 years to establish their legitimacy. But none - not one regime - has yet been able to risk free elections. Regimes planted by bayonets do not take root.

  Ronald Reagan

  Flower, Optimism, Risk

  Source: origin-www.rushlimbaugh.com

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• We're approaching the end of a bloody century plagued by a terrible political invention, totalitarianism. Optimism comes less easily today, not because democracy is less vigorous, but because democracy's enemies have refined their instruments of repression.

  Ronald Reagan

  Optimism, Political, Enemy

  Source: www.rushlimbaugh.com

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• We know what totalitarian looks like, we know what oppression looks like, we know what the dumb culture of totalitarianism smells like. This is it! It's happening now, and the future of the world is being decided. So, get out there, make your own sites, take action!

  Alex Jones

  Smell, Dumb, Culture

  Source: noworldorder.com

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• The State certainly played a decisive role. I also believe that it may have stemmed from the rivalry itself. Grow or die, devour or die. That's the one problem that I have to wrestle with. I have to wrestle with whether or not rivalry in the free market does not ultimately lead to concentration, corporatism, and finally totalitarianism.

  Murray Bookchin

  Believe, Doe, Roles

  Source: reason.com

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• People who resist authority, who defend the rights of the individual, who try in a period of increasing totalitarianism and centralization to reclaim these rights - this is the true left in the United States.

  Murray Bookchin

  Rights, People, Trying

  Source: reason.com

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• I would say that today the real support for State power and totalitarianism comes from the Communist parties and the Socialist parties and, where they are sizable, the Trotskyist groups. They are the ones that really frighten me.

  Murray Bookchin

  Real, Party, Support

  Source: reason.com

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• I was interested in the ways that artists responded to totalitarianism - the Czech Jazz Section, Romanian absurdist theatre, Brecht's alienation effect. The anything-goes, anarchic qualities of jazz and Surrealism seemed to offer a way to cross some of the forbidden frontiers of Eastern Europe.

  Nicholas Royle

  Artist, Europe, Theatre

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Men create their own gods and thus have some slight understanding that they are self-fabricated. Women are much more susceptible, because they are completely oppressed by men; they take men at their word and believe in the gods that men have made up. The situation of women, their culture, makes them kneel more often before the gods that have been created by men than men themselves do, who know what they've done. To this extent, women will be more fanatical, whether it is for fascism or for totalitarianism.

  Simone de Beauvoir

  Believe, Men, Self

  Source: www.iaphitalia.org

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• We must get rid of the IRS. It's a bureaucracy fraught with totalitarianism.

  Sonny Bono

  Irs, Bureaucracy

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• In contrast to totalitarianism, democracy can face and live with the truth about itself.

  Sidney Hook

  Democracy, Faces, Contrast

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• Collective bargaining has always been the bedrock of the American labor movement. I hope that you will continue to anchor your movement to this foundation. Free collective bargaining is good for the entire Nation. In my view, it is the only alternative to State regulation of wages and prices - a path which leads far down the grim road of totalitarianism. Those who would destroy or further limit the rights of organized labor - those who would cripple collective bargaining or prevent organization of the unorganized - do a disservice to the cause of democracy.

  John F. Kennedy

  Organization, Rights, Views

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• Let us never allow ourselves to think that poverty is an excuse for an invitation to totalitarianism, and if we should be tempted to think as much, let us remind ourselves that totalitarianism not only extinguishes liberty but institutionalises poverty as well

  Bernard Levin

  Thinking, Liberty, Poverty

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• Imperial politics represents the conquest of domestic politics and the latter's conversion into a crucial element of inverted totalitarianism. It makes no sense to ask how the democratic citizen could 'participate' substantively in imperial politics; hence it is not surprising that the subject of empire is taboo in electoral debates. No major politician or party has so much as publicly remarked on the existence of an American empire.

  Chalmers Johnson

  Party, Elements, Empires

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• If no divine law is recognized above the law of the State, then the law of man has become absolute in men's eyes--there is then no logical barrier to totalitarianism.

  Greg L. Bahnsen

  Eye, Men, Law

  Greg L. Bahnsen (1985). “By This Standard: The Authority of God's Law Today”, p.175, American Vision

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• The spirit of religious totalitarianism is abroad in the world; it is in the very air we breathe today in this land. Everywhere are those who claim to have a corner on righteousness, on direct access to God ... The bigots of the world are having a heyday.

  Sonia Johnson

  Religious, Air, Land

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• Freedom-loving people around the world must say . . . I am a refugee in a crowded boat foundering off the coast of Vietnam. I am Laotian, a Cambodian, a Cuban, and a Miskito Indian in Nicaragua. I, too, am a potential victim of totalitarianism.

  Ronald Reagan

  People, Nicaragua, Vietnam

  Ronald Reagan (2004). “Speaking My Mind: Selected Speeches”, p.265, Simon and Schuster

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• Totalitarianism spells simplification: an enormous reduction in the variety of aims, motives, interests, human types, and, above all, in the categories and units of power.

  Eric Hoffer

  Type, Reduction, Categories

  Eric Hoffer (1963). “The Ordeal of Change”

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• Religion, a mediaeval form of unreason, when combined with modern weaponry becomes a real threat to our freedoms. This religious totalitarianism has caused a deadly mutation in the heart of Islam and we see the tragic consequences in Paris today.

  Salman Rushdie

  Religious, Real, Heart

  "Salman Rushdie condemns attack on Charlie Hebdo". www.englishpen.org. January 7, 2015.

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• For some reason which I have failed to understand, many people like the system [scientific totalitarianism] when it is Russian but disliked the very same system when it was German. I am compelled to think that this is due to the power of labels; these people like whatever is labelled ‘Left’ without examining whether the label has any justification.

  Bertrand Russell

  Thinking, People, Labels

  Bertrand Russell (2016). “The Impact of Science on Society”, p.40, Routledge

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• Book cover, 'Reefer Club' Totalitarianism is when people believe they can punish their way to perfection.

  Newt Gingrich

  War, Believe, Book

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• What kind of victory is it when someone is left defeated? What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy. What is a war criminal? Was not war itself a crime against God and humanity, and, therefore, were not all those who sanctioned, engineered and conducted wars, war criminals? The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong. Non-cooperation with evil is a sacred duty.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Strong, War, Differences

  Non-Violence in Peace and War (1942) vol. 1, ch. 142

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