Robert M. Hutchins Quotes

The time has come for you to decide whether Italians shall die for Mussolini and Hitler, or live for Italy and for civilization.

The draft is the corollary of militarism and militarism spells death to democracy.

When people understand that they are constantly monitored, they are more conformist - they are less willing to take up controversial positions - and that kind of mass conformity is incompatible with democracy.

Getting out to protest, this is something real and, I would say, something patriotic. Part of the new authoritarianism is to get people to prefer fiction and inaction to reality and action.

This is not supposed to be a fascist country, where you are forced to do things you don't want to do. This is a free country.

Once you start choking the space for dissent in a democracy, people feel pushed to the wall and then it leads to further dissent and alienation.

To compare the United States of America - the beacon of the free world - to the brutal North Korean dictatorship is as insulting as it is asinine.

Thought that is silenced is always rebellious. Majorities, of course, are often mistaken. This is why the silencing of minorities is necessarily dangerous. Criticism and dissent are the indispensable antidote to major delusions.

Civilization after civilization, it is the same. The world falls to tyranny with a whisper. The frightened are ever keen to bow to a perceived necessity, in the belief that necessity forces conformity, and conformity a certain stability. In a world shaped into conformity, dissidents stand out, are easily branded and dealt with. There is no multitude of perspectives, no dialogue. The victim assumes the face of the tyrant, self-righteous and intransigent, and wars breed like vermin. And people die.

Let us never allow ourselves to think that poverty is an excuse for an invitation to totalitarianism, and if we should be tempted to think as much, let us remind ourselves that totalitarianism not only extinguishes liberty but institutionalises poverty as well

To view the opposition as dangerous is to misunderstand the basic concepts of democracy. To oppress the opposition is to assault the very foundation of democracy.

The intolerant man will not rely on persuasion, or on the worth of the idea. He would deny to others the very freedom of opinion or of dissent which he so stridently demands for himself. He cannot trust democracy.

Culture civilizes us, and that's why every single despotic regime has tried to smash [the arts].

The nightmare in every democracy, the very nightmare, is if it gets worse and worse and worse, we could end up totalitarian.

Again and again there comes a time in history when the man who dares to say that two and two make four is punished with death. ("The Plague")

Revolution means democracy in today's world, not the enslavement of peoples to the corrupt and degrading horrors of totalitarianism

Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism as I understand it.

A democratic despotism is like a theocracy: it assumes its own correctness.

No country can be called free which is governed by an absolute power; and it matters not whether it be an absolute royal power or an absolute legislative power, as the consequences will be the same to the people.

In any nation in which people's rights have been subordinated to the rights of the few, in any totalitarian nation, the first institution to be dismantled is the jury. I was, I am, afraid.

Despots and democratic majorities are drunk with power.

Popular suffrage is in itself no guarantee of freedom. People can vote themselves into slavery.

Whenever all men are...hastening to be slaves or tyrants we make Liberalism the prime bogey.

When threatened, the first thing a democracy gives up is democracy.

The Marxians love of democratic institutions was a stratagem only, a pious fraud for the deception of the masses. Within a socialist community there is no room left for freedom.