Evan Esar Quotes

The National Socialist Party will prevent in the future, by force if necessary, all meetings and lectures which are likely to exercise a depressing influence on the German state.

Even the most repressive regimes seek to maintain the fiction that they have the people’s interest at heart.

Every Superstate has one iron rule: logic is an enemy and the truth is a menace.

Our Press and our schools cultivate Chauvinism, militarism, dogmatism, conformism and ignorance. The arbitrary power of the Government is unlimited, and unexampled in history; freedom of the Press, of opinion and of movement are as thoroughly exterminated as though the proclamation of the Rights of Man had never been. We have built up the most gigantic police apparatus, with informers made a national institution, and the most refined scientific system of political and mental torture. We whip the groaning masses of the country towards a theoretical future happiness, which only we can.

Mussolini never killed anyone. Mussolini used to send people on vacation in internal exile.

With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power.

The real evil of the Russian communist state is not communism. It is the secret police and the concentration camp.

Authoritarian systems evolve. Authoritarianism in the Internet Age is not your old Cold War authoritarianism.

In the Soviet Union it was illegal to take a photograph of a train station. Look what happened to them. They tried to classify everything.

The trend in China is toward tighter and tighter control. They are basically improving their censorship mechanisms.

But, in North Korea, it's just the opposite. There's one story. It's written by the Kim regime. And 23 million people are conscripted to be secondary characters. There, as a youth, your aptitude towards certain jobs is measured, and the rest of your life is dictated, whether you'll be a fisherman or a farmer or an opera singer.

The Thought Police: To censor and protect.

For 73 years a totalitarian regime ruled the country. Totalitarian regime.

Nondemocratic regimes imperil the security of the world. They stay in power by controlling their populations. This control invariably requires an increasing amount of repression. To justify this repression and maintain internal stability, external enemies must be manufactured.

Our political life is closed, and our freedoms usurped, and our people are oppressed, and fearful… if you don’t say what the ruler wants, you’re exiled beyond the sun.

Fig leaves of democratic procedure … hide the nakedness of Stalinist dictatorship

In its mad passion for power, the Communist State even sought to strengthen and deepen the very ideas and conceptions which the Revolution had come to destroy. It supported and encouraged all the worst antisocial qualities and systematically destroyed the already awakened conception of the new revolutionary values

There are no longer opponents of Putin's policy, and if there are, they are mentally ill and should be sent to prophylactic health examination.

In power for 16 years now, Mr. Putin and his global propaganda machine aggressively promote the idea that democracy is a chaotic mess that only the hero Putin can save Russia from falling into.

Totalitarianism is not about some state that appears out of nowhere and suddenly is all-powerful. There can't be any such thing. Totalitarianism starts when the difference between your public life and your private life is effaced.

In authoritarian societies, cultural institutions tend to become ideological proxies - think of the National Ballet in Cuba or the East German gymnastics team.

When demagogues and dictators ban art, this is the reason: art is the great solvent of obedient fundamentalism.

The North Korean regime really can control people. I think they are the best dictator in the whole planet.

We are hurtling back into a Soviet abyss, into an information vacuum that spells death from our own ignorance. All we have left is the internet, where information is still freely available. For the rest, if you want to go on working as a journalist, it's total servility to Putin. Otherwise, it can be death, the bullet, poison, or trial -whatever our special services, Putin's guard dogs, see fit.

Wherever there is a jackboot stomping on a human face there will be a well-heeled Western liberal to explain that the face does, after all, enjoy free health care and 100 percent literacy.