Despotic governments can stand ‘moral force’ till the cows come home; what they fear is physical force.

In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of...

It was sometimes feebly argued, as the political and military war against this enemy ran into difficulties, that it was ‘a war without end.’ I never saw the point of this plaintive objection. The war...

Universal peace-time conscription was adopted by almost all countries as the basis of their military system. This ensured that wars would grow bigger in scale, longer in duration, and worse in effects. While conscription appeared...

A tax-supported, compulsory educational system is the complete model of the totalitarian state.

Every culture has its distinctive and normal system of government. Yours is democracy, moderated by corruption. Ours is totalitarianism, moderated by assassination.

Even though Christ Himself would not deliver us from the power of the Totalitarian State, as He did not deliver Himself, we must see His purpose in it all. Maybe his children are being persecuted...

I used to call myself a single-issue voter on the essential question of defending civilization against its terrorist enemies and their totalitarian protectors, and on that ‘issue’ I hope I can continue to expose and...

If the old saying is true, that what one generation learns in school is the philosophy of the next, then the philosophy of the next generation will be totalitarianism.

In this confusion we begin to see what lies behind John Paul II’s startling warning about democracy “effectively mov[ing] towards a form of totalitarianism.” It begins to happen at a practical level when we simultaneously...

Information is the oxygen of the modern age. It seeps through the walls topped by barbed wire, it wafts across the electrified borders. … The Goliath of totalitarianism will be brought down by the David...

The only way to leave the circle, to stop dancing with the jailer, is to find a way to preserve one’s individuality, that unique which evades description but differentiates one human being from the other.

Every time I do an interview people ask similar questions, such as “What is the most significant story that you have revealed?” […] There really is only one overarching point that all of these stories...

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...

A democracy without values easily turns into open or thinly disguised totalitarianism.

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.

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...

The real struggle for us is for the citizen to cease to be the property of the state.

Make no choice, and you have chosen. Failure to decide, because you lack the right, is itself a decision, First Councilor. In abstaining, you vote.

The people who must never have power are the humorless. To impossible certainties of rectitude they ally tedium and uniformity.

It’s ridiculous to talk about freedom in a society dominated by huge corporations. What kind of freedom is there inside a corporation? They’re totalitarian institutions – you take orders from above and maybe give them...

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...

Does human nature undergo a true change in the cauldron of totalitarian violence? Does man lose his innate yearning for freedom? The fate of both man and the totalitarian State depends on the answer to...

In 1870, came the victory of the short-service troops of Prussia over the long-service troops of France, where conscription had but recently been reintroduced in a partial form and as a supplementary measure. That obvious...

The amount of violations of human rights in a country is always an inverse function of the amount of complaints about human rights violations heard from there. The greater the number of complaints being aired,...

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...

Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.

A few have become acquainted with Orwell’s 1984; because it is both difficult to obtain and dangerous to possess, it is known only to certain members of the Inner Party. Orwell fascinates them through his...

And it was not merely tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, but hundreds of millions of people who were the obedient witnesses of this slaughter of the innocent. Nor were they merely obedient witnesses:...

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...

In einem maßlosen Staat […] gibt es vielleicht ein wenig mehr Sicherheit, aber ganz sicher sehr viel weniger Freiheit.

In his book The Captive Mind, written in 1951-2 and published in the West in 1953, the Polish poet and essayist Czeslaw Milosz paid Orwell one of the greatest compliments that one writer has ever...

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...

War, Nobby. Huh! What is it good for?” he said. “Dunno, Sarge. Freeing slaves, maybe?””Absol—well, okay.” “Defending yourself against a totalitarian aggressor?””All right, I’ll grant you that, but—””Saving civilization from a horde of—” “It doesn’t...

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.

Ultimately, totalitarianism is the only sort of politics that can truly serve the sky-god’s purpose. Any movement of a liberal nature endangers his authority and that of his delegates on earth. One God, one King,...

I dispute the right of conservatives to be automatically complacent on these points. My own Marxist group took a consistently anti-Moscow line throughout the ‘Cold War,’ and was firm in its belief that that Soviet...

On the ‘Celestial Seasonings’ green tea packet there is a short explanation of its benefits: ‘Green tea is a natural source of antioxidants, which neutralize harmful molecules in the body known as free radicals. By...

If you can feel that staying human is worth while, even when it can’t have any result whatever, you’ve beaten them.

Disorder is inherent in stability. Civilized man doesn’t understand stability. He’s confused it with rigidity. Our political and economic and social leaders drool about stability constantly. It’s their favorite word, next to ‘power.’ ‘Gotta stabilize...

Dr. Kim couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen a bowl of pure white rice. What was a bowl of rice doing there, just sitting out on the ground? She figured it out just before...

Looking into the mirror I ask myself:”You live in a house equipped with air conditioning.You eat tasty food.You utilize convenient transportation to travel.You utilize convenient information technology to live.Could you not say that you, who...

The distrust of wit is the beginning of tyranny.

Because the horror of Communism, Stalinism, is not that bad people do bad things — they always do. It’s that good people do horrible things thinking they are doing something great.”[Six Questions for Slavoj Žižek,...

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...

Basically National Socialism and Marxism are the same thing

I love my country, not my government.

But democrats are seldom welcome on planets run by totalitarian governments, and scarcely more welcome on planets where anarchy prevails–this is due to the very nature of democracy, the only practical compromise between totalitarianism and...

Depending on the contemporary mood, Orwell oscillates from Saint George to George the Seer to George the Sage. What other thinker has been both so fervidly claimed and derided by both the left and right?...

If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face–forever.