TOTALITARIANISM QUOTES
quotations about totalitarianism
We had all become used to the totalitarian system and accepted it as an unchangeable fact and thus helped to perpetuate it. In other words, we are all -- though naturally to differing extents -- responsible for the operation of the totalitarian machinery. None of us is just its victim. We are all also its co-creators.
VACLAV HAVEL
New Year's Address, January 1, 1990
I have been a visiting writer in several authoritarian and totalitarian states, and usually the question answers itself. Someone in a café makes an offhand remark. A piece of ironic graffiti is scrawled in the men's room. Some group at the university issues some improvised leaflet. The glacier begins to melt; a joke makes the rounds and the apparently immovable regime suddenly looks vulnerable and absurd.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays
With the terrifying tenacity of a cancer once thought cured that will never go away, totalitarianism is back in fashion.
THE COMMENTATOR
"Totalitarianism is back in fashion", The Commentator, November 1, 2013
A totalitarian society which succeeded in perpetuating itself would probably set up a schizophrenic system of thought, in which the laws of common sense held good in everyday life and in certain exact sciences, but could be disregarded by the politician, the historian, and the sociologist.
GEORGE ORWELL
Books v. Cigarettes
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
The Origins of Totalitarianism
Totalitarian tyranny is the twin of total warfare--which might aptly be termed a reversion to tribal warfare on a larger scale.
B. H. LIDDELL HART
The Revolution in Warfare
Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda.
HANNAH ARENDT
The Origins of Totalitarianism
The all-seeing eye of a totalitarian regime is usually the watchful eye of the next-door neighbor.
ERIC HOFFER
The Ordeal of Change
The right of dissent, or if you prefer, the right to be wrong, is surely fundamental to the existence of a democratic society. That's the right that went first in every nation that stumbled down the trail toward totalitarianism.
EDWARD R. MURROW
attributed, Murrow, His Life and Times
Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.
NOAM CHOMSKY
Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda
A democracy without values easily turns into open or thinly disguised totalitarianism.
POPE JOHN PAUL II
The Splendor of Truth
The modern condition of rootlessness is a foundational experience of totalitarianism; totalitarian movements succeed when they offer rootless people what they most crave: an ideologically consistent world aiming at grand narratives that give meaning to their lives.
ROGER BERKOWITZ
"Why Arendt Matters: Revisiting 'The Origins of Totalitarianism'", L.A. Review of Books, March 18, 2017
The worst crime committed by totalitarian mind-sets is that they force their citizens, including their victims, to become complicit in their crimes. Dancing with your jailer, participating in your own execution, that is an act of utmost brutality.
AZAR NAFISI
Reading Lolita in Tehran
The totalitarian attempt at global conquest and total domination has been the destructive way out of all impasses. Its victory may coincide with the destruction of humanity; wherever it has ruled, it has begun to destroy the essence of man.
HANNAH ARENDT
preface, The Origins of Totalitarianism
Nationalism leads to totalitarianism, and totalitarianism leads to idolatry. It becomes not a principle of politics but a new religion and, let me add, a false religion.
ROBERT CECIL
"The Future of Civilization", June 1, 1938
Totalitarianism is patriotism institutionalized.
STEVE ALLEN
Reflections
Somebody once declared that the only two political theories that are completely consistent are anarchy and totalitarianism. Anarchy fully embraces the concept of self, totalitarianism fully rejects that concept.
DARRELL ANDERSON
"What is Liberty?"
People who live in the post-totalitarian system know only too well that the question of whether one or several political parties are in power, and how these parties define and label themselves, is of far less importance than the question of whether or not it is possible to live like a human being.
VACLAV HAVEL
"The Power of the Powerless", Living in Truth
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face--forever.
GEORGE ORWELL
1984
Totalitarianism strives not toward despotic rule over men, but toward a system in which men are superfluous. Total power can be achieved and safeguarded only in a world of conditioned reflexes, of marionettes.
HANNAH ARENDT
The Origins of Totalitarianism