#totalitarian

A Stalin functionary admitted, "Innocent people were arrested: naturally - otherwise no one would be frightened. If people, he said, were arrested only for specific misdemeanours, all the others would feel safe and so become ripe for treason. ↗

— Paul Johnson

#totalitarianism #nature

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

#resistance #totalitarianism #totalitarianism

Nos instruyen y preparan en la juventud para una profesión, para cumplir los deberes ciudadanos, para el servicio militar, nos enseñaban las reglas del aseo, a comportarnos bien y hasta a comprender lo bello (esto último no tanto). Pero la instrucción, la educación, la experiencia, no nos preparan en absoluto para la gran prueba de nuestra vida: para el arresto por nada y para el sumario sobre nada. ↗

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#totalitarianism #totalitarianism

As persons, so Mournier maintained, we possess both a spiritual and temporal dimension; we exist in history, in relationship with others, but open to transcendence and ultimately to God. This concept of the person, he believed, was denied as much by an atheistic totalitarianism of the Left as by the bourgeois materialism of capitalist society. To the extent that Christianity had become infected by the bourgeois spirit, it had become a prop in what he called, 'the established disorder. ↗

— Robert Ellsberg

#totalitarianism

Not even the most heavily-armed police state can exert brute force to all of its citizens all of the time. Meme management is so much subtler; the rose-tinted refraction of perceived reality, the contagious fear of threatening alternatives. ↗

— Peter Watts

#marketing #memes #perception-of-reality #power #totalitarianism

A new breeze is blowing, and a world refreshed by freedom seems reborn; for in man's heart, if not in fact, the day of the dictator is over. The totalitarian era is passing, its old ideas blown away like leaves from an ancient, lifeless tree. ↗

— George H. W. Bush

#away #blowing #blown #blown away #breeze

Anti-Americanism is a pure totalitarian concept. The very notion is idiotic. ↗

— Noam Chomsky

#idiotic #notion #pure #totalitarian #very

Only the freedom of mind can prevent the state from becoming totalitarian and from issuing totalitarian demands. ↗

— Friedrich Durrenmatt

#demands #freedom #issuing #mind #only

The Chinese art world does not exist. In a society that restricts individual freedoms and violates human rights, anything that calls itself creative or independent is a pretence. It is impossible for a totalitarian society to create anything with passion and imagination. ↗

— Ai Weiwei

#art #art world #calls #chinese #create

The savior who wants to turn men into angels is as much a hater of human nature as the totalitarian despot who wants to turn them into puppets. ↗

— Eric Hoffer

#despot #hater #human #human nature #into