Rebecca MacKinnon Quotes

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

The statues of Lenin and Stalin are down, but the fight against their ghosts seems harder.

'Hunger Games' is a tried-and-true tale about a totalitarian society. It's more similar to China than America, but it's also similar to Nazi Germany and anywhere where the populace gets semi-brainwashed into serving the agenda of a very few.

All that is needed to set us definitely on the road to a Fascist society is war. It will of course be a modified form of Fascism at first.

Dystopian novels, such as Orwell's 'Nineteen Eighty-Four,' often tend to site their despotised or deformed civilisations in urban environments.

'1984' is not a wonder tale. Not only could it happen, but it has happened, but under different names.

In a strange way, I expected Russia to become more like America since the Soviet Union collapsed, but the reverse is true. America has become more like Russia: a kleptocratic society.

The Thought Police: To censor and protect.

A functioning police state needs no police.

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 age has seen the birth of totalitarian systems and forms of tyranny which would not have been possible in the time before the technological leap forward.

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.

Communism of every type and stripe brings with it an ideological straight jacket. Thought control, brain-washing, censorship, imprisonment, exile, mental and physical torture are the indispensable weapons of Communist rule.

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

… the inhuman communist police state tyranny

When I entered the film school at the Prague Academy in the '50s, it was the hardest time in the Communist countries. The ideological control of the society was almost absolute.

I've studied authoritarianism for a very long time - for 40 years - and they're started by people's attempts to control the ideological and linguistic territory.

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.

This bill reminds me of the tactics of the former Soviet Union - and we know how successful that was.

It is hard for power to enjoy or incorporate humour and satire in its system of control.

Many Communist government officials have a rigid, dictatorial power, but they live in constant suspicion and fear of anything that might undermine the power they have.

Dictatorships start wars because they need external enemies to exert internal control over their own people.

As a reader, I've always been interested in dystopian novels like 'Nineteen Eighty-four'.

The more complete the despotism, the more smoothly all things move on the surface.

Fascism is a worldwide disease. Its greatest threat to the United States will come after the war, either via Latin America or within the United States itself.