Top Totalitarianism Quotes

Very often the test of one's allegiance to a cause or to a people is precisely the willingness to stay the course when things are boring, to run the risk of repeating an old argument just one more tim...

I love my country, not my government.

Big Government' is a lot less like a 'Big Brother', and a lot more like a mother-in-law.

Most schooling is training for stupidity and conformity, and that's institutional, but occasionally you get a spark, somebody'll challenge your mind, make you think and so on, and that has a tremendou...

Nine out of ten eugenicists in the 20th Century were also Progressives or Socialists, as central to the eugenic creed is the desire to engineer and centrally plan human reproduction and heredity. Thes...

Many things in this period have been hard to bear, or hard to take seriously. My own profession went into a protracted swoon during the Reagan-Bush-Thatcher decade, and shows scant sign of recovering...

Sooner or later, all talk among foreigners in Pyongyang turns to one imponderable subject. Do the locals really believe what they are told, and do they truly revere Fat Man and Little Boy? I have been...

The 20th Century proved that there is nothing more dangerous to the health of ethnic minority communities than big government.

When enough people understand reality, tyrants can literally be ignored out of existence. They can't ever be voted out of existence.

Let's say that the consensus is that our species, being the higher primates, Homo Sapiens, has been on the planet for at least 100,000 years, maybe more. Francis Collins says maybe 100,000. Richard Da...

The North Korean capital, Pyongyang, is a city consecrated to the worship of a father-son dynasty. (I came to think of them, with their nuclear-family implications, as 'Fat Man and Little Boy.') And a...

I saw exactly one picture of Marx and one of Lenin in my whole stay, but it's been a long time since ideology had anything to do with it. Not without cunning, Fat Man and Little Boy gradually mutated...

The central planners of Democratic Socialism tighten their noose when people resist their plans and assert their rights. All Socialism is intended to devolve into Communism, and as a result, Totalitar...

Let's say that the consensus is that our species, being the higher primates, Homo Sapiens, has been on the planet for at least 100,000 years, maybe more. Francis Collins says maybe 100,000. Richard Da...

What drove such people to their sinister occupations? Spite? Certainly, but also the desire for order. Because the desire for order tries to transform the human world into an inorganic reign in which...

I was hungry when I left Pyongyang. I wasn't hungry just for a bookshop that sold books that weren't about Fat Man and Little Boy. I wasn't ravenous just for a newspaper that had no pictures of F.M. a...

Well, as Hannah Arendt famously said, there can be a banal aspect to evil. In other words, it doesn't present always. I mean, often what you're meeting is a very mediocre person. But nonetheless, you...

A "centrally planned economy" by definition discourages and despises participation by the masses. It's a bureaucratic oligarchy.

Knowledge can never imprison you, but you can be captive to your ignorance.

There is a very dangerous myth that #Hitler was solely fueled by racism. His desire to engineer society was pervasive. Racism alone cannot explain what happened in The Holocaust without also addressin...