Totalitarianism Quotes

“We are witnessing the uglification of the world, the Globalist goal is to make the whole planet identical in its atomizing dreariness by dulling our senses they hope to dull our very life essence. This is all inherently totalitarian, but in an Age of Ugliness a work of beauty is an act of defiance.”
― Paul Joseph Watson

“Freedom of expression is a basic expression of freedom.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Looking from the outside in, one cannot see, for example, whether people attend a parade because they are forced to do so or because they so desire. Researchers generally assumed one or the other: either that people were passive victims or that they were fervent believers. But on the inside, both assumptions were wrong, for all the people at the parade (or any other form of collective action) and for each one of them individually. They did not feel like helpless victims, but they did not feel like fanatics either. They felt normal. They were members of a society. The parades and various other forms of collective life gave them a sense of belonging that humans generally need. ... They would not be lying if they said that they wanted to be a part of the parade, or the collective in general - and that if they exerted pressure on others to be a part of the collective too, they did so willingly. But this did not make them true believers in the ideology, in the way Westerners might imagine it: the ideology served simply as a key to unity, as the collective's shared language. In addition, the mark of a totalitarian ideology, according to [Hannah] Arendt, was its hermetic nature: it explained away the entire world, and no argument could pierce its bubble. Soviet citizens lived inside the ideology - it was their home, and it felt ordinary.”
― Masha Gessen, The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

“It was the oldest trick in the book - a constant state of low-level dread made people easy to control, because it robbed them of the sense that they could control anything themselves. This was not the sort of anxiety that moved people to action and accomplishment. This was the sort of anxiety that exceeded human capacity. ... You can no longer sit still or reason. You regress, and after a while the only thing you can do is scream, like a helpless terrified baby. you need an adult, a figure of authority. Almost anyone willing to take charge will do. And then, if that someone wants to remain in charge, he will have to make sure that you continue to feel helpless.

The whole country felt helpless. You could see it if you turned on the television, which Arutyunyan rarely did. Everyone on television was screaming all the time.”
― Masha Gessen, The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

“Power is a poison.”
― Neil Sharpson, When the Sparrow Falls

“In functioning democracies, the contradictions between avowed ideals and reality can be and often are called out, causing social and political change. That does not eliminate the built-in gap, but it has a way of making societies a little more democratic and a little less unequal, in spurts. Totalitarian ideology allows no such correction. Hannah Arendt maintained that any ideology can become totalitarian, but for that to happen it needs to be reduced to a single simple idea, which is then turned into a single simple idea from which the ostensible 'laws of history' are derived - and enforced through terror. What distinguishes a totalitarian ideology is its utterly insular quality. It purports to explain the entire world and everything in it. There is no gap between totalitarian ideology and reality because totalitarian ideology contains all of reality within itself.”
― Masha Gessen, The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

“When the word 'totalitarianism' is used in casual Western speech, it conjures the image of a monstruous society in which force is applied to every person at all times. Of course, that would be impossibly inefficient, even for an extremely inefficient state such as the Soviet Union. The economy force in totalitarian societies is achieved through terror. Totalitarianism establishes its own social contract, in which most people will be safe from violence most of the time, provided they stay within certain boundaries and shoulder some of the responsibility for keeping other citizens within the same boundaries. The boundaries are ever-shifting - Arendt described totalitarian societies as producing a state of constant flux and inconsistency - and this requires the population to be ever-vigilant in order to stay abreast of the shifts. A hypersensitivity to signals is essential for survival.”
― Masha Gessen, The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

“[Hannah] Arendt wrote about the subjugation of public space - in effect the disappearance of public space, which, by depriving a person of boundaries and agency, rendered him profoundly lonely.”
― Masha Gessen, The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

“Nazism is a psychological problem, but the psychological factors themselves have to be understood as being molded by socio-economic factors; Nazism is an economic and political problem, but the hold it has over a whole people has to be understood on psychological grounds.”
― Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom

“[Hannah] Arendt pointed out that both the Nazi and the Soviet regimes conducted periodic purges or crackdowns, which she called 'an instrument of permanent instability.' Constant flux was necessary for the system's survival: 'The totalitarian ruler must, at any price, prevent normalization from reaching the point where a new way of life could develop - one which might, after a time, lose its bastard qualities and take its place among the widely differing and profoundly contrasting ways of life of the nations of the earth.' Indeed, she wrote, 'The point is that both Hitler and Stalin held out promises of stability in order to hide their intention of creating a state of permanent instability.”
― Masha Gessen, The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

“The antisemitic parties' claim to be "above all parties" announced clearly their aspiration to become the representative of the whole nation, to get exclusive power, to take possession of the state machinery, to substitute themselves for the state.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

“Trying to eliminate antipathy, dislike, ridicule, and insult from the human heart and mind is a task to make that of Sisyphus seem like an afternoon stroll: precisely the type of task that authoritarian governments love, for it gives them the locus standi to interfere ever more intimately with the lives of their subjects. Hatred is hydra-headed, the task is never done, it grows with its very elimination, or rather the attempts by government at its elimination. Failure is the greatest success, since it requires ever more of the same, namely control over society.”
― Theodore Dalrymple

“In Chapter 77, you had people of totally different worldviews and ideas joined together,” says Patrik. “You had, for example, democratic socialists on the one side and fervent Catholics on the other side. It was totally normal for me that as a small child, I was being raised in a community of people with very different opinions. So it shattered the bubble around me.”
The lesson of valuing diversity within a broader unity of shared goals is something that Christians today need to embrace.
“When we look at what’s happening in America today, we see that you are building walls and creating gaps between people,” he says. “For us, we are always willing to speak, to talk with the other side to avoid building walls between people. You know, it is much easier to indoctrinate someone who is enclosed within a set of walls.”
― Rod Dreher, Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents

“Bulgakov always loved clowning and agreed with E. T. A. Hoffmann that irony and buffoonery are expressions of ‘the deepest contemplation contemplation of life in all its conditionality’.

It is not by chance that his stage adaptations of the comic masterpieces of Gogol and Cervantes coincided with the writing of The Master and Margarita. Behind such specific ‘influences’ stands the age-old tradition of folk humour with its carnivalized world-view, its reversals and dethronings, its relativizing of worldly absolutes—a tradition that was the subject of a monumental study by Bulgakov’s countryman and contemporary Mikhail Bakhtin. Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World, which in its way was as much an explosion of Soviet reality as Bulgakov’s novel, appeared in 1965, a year before The Master and Margarita. The coincidence was not lost on Russian readers. Commenting on it, Bulgakov’s wife noted that, while there had never been any direct link between the two men, they were both responding to the same historical situation from the same cultural basis.”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

“Homo Sovieticus was caught in an infinite spiral of lies: pretending to be, pretending to have, pretending to believe, and pretending not to. The fakery concerned the most basic of facts and the most fundamental of values, and what lay at the bottom of the spiral was an absence: 'even to understand the word "doublethink" involved the use of doublethink.' The system destroyed the individual and the fabric of society: nothing was possible in the absence of everything, resulting, wrote [Yuri] Levada, in 'the falling standards of education, culture, morality, in the degradation of all of society.”
― Masha Gessen, The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

“Back at the beginning of the Reformation, wrote [Erich] Fromm, the individual gained the ability to determine his own path - and at the same time lost his sense of certainty in place and self. Fromm divided newfound freedom into two parts: 'freedom to' and 'freedom from.' If the former was positive, the latter could cause unbearable anxiety: 'The world has become limitless and at the same time threatening. ... By losing his fixed place in a closed world man loses the answer to the meaning of his life; the result is that doubt has befallen him concerning himself and the aim of life.' Along came Martin Luther and John Calvin with remedies for this anxiety: 'By not only accepting his own insignificance but by humiliating himself to the utmost, by giving up every vestige of individual will, by renouncing and denouncing his individual strength, the individual could hop to be acceptable to God.' In other words, the individual could in one swoop regain his certainty in the future - it would now be in God's hands - and rid himself of his most unbearable burden: the self.

In Fromm's view, a new kind of character was thus inaugurated and soon became prevalent among the middle classes of some societies. He described this character as someone who by an individual psychoanalyst might be diagnosed as a sadomasochistic personality but on the level of social psychology could be called the 'authoritarian personality' - in part because sadomasochistic tendencies in individual relationships are usually understood as a pathology while similar behavior in society can be the most rational and 'normal' strategy. The authoritarian character survives by surrending his power to an outside authority - God or a leader - whom Fromm called the 'magic helper.' The 'magic helper' is a source of guidance, security, and also of pride, because with surrender comes a sense of belonging.”
― Masha Gessen, The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

“Another key trait of the authoritarian character is his longing for a belief in historical determination and permanence: [Erich From wrote,] 'It is fate that there are wars and that one part of mankind has to be ruled by another. It is fate that the amount of suffering can never be less than it always has been. ... The authoritarian character worships the past. What has been, will eternally be. To wish or to work for something that has not yet been before is crime or madness. The miracle of creation - and creation is always a miracle - is outside his range of emotional experience.”
― Masha Gessen, The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

“[Erich] Fromm observed no logic whatsoever in the ideology [of fascism]: 'Nazism never had any genuine political or economic principles. It is essential to understand that the very principle of Nazism is its radical opportunism.' What Nazi ideology and practice did have, according to Fromm, was ritual that satisfied the audience's masochistic craving: 'They are told again and again: the individual is nothing and does not count. The individual should accept this personal insignificance, dissolve himself in a higher power, and then feel proud in participating in the strength and glory of this higher power.'

And for the sadistic side of the authoritarian character, the ideology offered 'a feeling of superiority over the rest of mankind' that, Fromm wrote, was able to 'compensate them - for a time a least - for the fact that their lives had been impoverished, economically and culturally.”
― Masha Gessen, The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

“When Arutyunyan looked at her [psychoanalysis] clients, she almost found herself missing the early Putin years. For her, that had been a time when things started shutting down - when a world in which, for a decade or more, opportunity had seemed limitless, began closing in. But she had known even then that she was in the minority. Most of her clients craved 'stability,' whatever that meant. It had all been too much for them for years. Their anxiety had been intolerable: what Artuyunyan had experienced as 'freedom from' the constraints of the totalitarian state, many of her clients experienced as 'freedom to' - find a way, measure up, do as well as the others. When the first constraints began snapping back into place, to the beat of the 'stability' drum, they had felt calmer. One client had finally felt grounded enough to start her own business - something that she had wanted and feared for years. She, and the business, did well for a while. In fact, even now the business was doing well enough. But the client was having panic attacks. So many laws had changed without warning, so many unwritten rules had gone into effect, that she was constantly unsure whether she had missed something.”
― Masha Gessen, The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

“What options did this frightening country offer its intolerably anxious citizens? They could curl up into total passivity, or they could join a whole that was greater than they were. If any possession could be summarily taken away, no one felt any longer like anything was truly their own. But they could rejoice alongside other citizens that Crimea was 'theirs.' They could fully subscribe to the paranoid worldview in which everyone, led by the United States, was out to weaken and destroy Russia. Paranoia offered a measure of comfort: at least it placed the source of overwhelming anxiety securely outside the person and even the country. It was a great relief to belong, and to entrust authority to someone stronger. The only thing was, belonging itself required vigilance. One had to pay attention: one day Ukraine was where the important war was being fought, the next day it was Syria. In the paranoid worldview, the source of danger was a constantly moving target. One could belong, but one could never feel in control.”
― Masha Gessen, The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

“The attempt to politicize everything is the destruction of politics. When everything is seen as relevant to politics, than politics has in fact become totalitarian.”
― Bernard Crick, In Defence of Politics

“We are not content with negative obedience, nor even with the most abject submission. When finally you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will. We do not destroy the heretic because he resists us: so long as he resists us we never destroy him. We convert him, we capture his inner mind, we reshape him. We burn all evil and all illusion out of him; we bring him over to our side, not in appearance, but genuinely, heart and soul. We make him one of ourselves before we kill him. It is intolerable to us that an erroneous thought should exist anywhere in the world, however secret and powerless it may be. Even in the instant of death we cannot permit any deviation.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“in about 1950, Arendt gave a lecture with the enigmatic title "The Eggs Speak Up," explained by the epigraph she chose from "A War" by Randall Jarrell:

There set out, slowly, for a Different World,
At four, on winter mornings, different legs...
You can't break eggs without making an omelette
-That's what they tell the eggs.

Jarrell had read in Origins that totalitarianism forged a "chain of fatality" - a chain of logical arguments - which threatens to "suppress men from the history of the human race." Jarrell's poem reads like a response to this sentence since it is about the necessity of interrupting this chain. With this epigraph, Arendt introduces her listeners to what she has to say.”
― Marie Luise Knott, Unlearning with Hannah Arendt

“The alteration of the past is necessary for two reasons,
one of which is subsidiary and, so to speak, precaution-
ary. The subsidiary reason is that the Party member, like
the proletarian, tolerates present-day conditions partly be-
cause he has no standards of comparison. He must be cut
off from the past, just as he must be cut off from foreign
countries, because it is necessary for him to believe that
he is better off than his ancestors and that the average lev-
el of material comfort is constantly rising. But by far the
more important reason for the readjustment of the past is
the need to safeguard the infallibility of the Party.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“There are thousands of Himmlers living among us.”
― Erich Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness

“Instead of seeing sense there is a major tendency to 'make sense.”
― James Tunney, Empire of Scientism: The Dispiriting Conspiracy and Inevitable Tyranny of Scientocracy

“Machines like objectives and not other perspectives.”
― James Tunney, Empire of Scientism: The Dispiriting Conspiracy and Inevitable Tyranny of Scientocracy

“Globalisation was a tactic rather than a strategy. The strategy was control and termination of homo sapiens as we know it.”
― James Tunney, Empire of Scientism: The Dispiriting Conspiracy and Inevitable Tyranny of Scientocracy

“You will not be merely servant or sufferant of the colonial power, you will be the colony itself to be managed, subjugated and controlled.”
― James Tunney, Empire of Scientism: The Dispiriting Conspiracy and Inevitable Tyranny of Scientocracy

“Conquer your fears once and for all or continue to be conquered forever.”
― James Tunney, Empire of Scientism: The Dispiriting Conspiracy and Inevitable Tyranny of Scientocracy