Michael Parenti Quotes

When Xi Jinping came to power, there were a series of hints that market-based capitalism would be allowed to move forward under his leadership. At the first real threat, they've fallen over themselves to impose government control.

A functioning police state needs no police.

Intermediary liability enables the Chinese authorities to minimize the number of people they need to put in jail in order to stay in power and to maximize their control over what the Chinese people know and don't know.

The statists want to control the economy.

Most governments are designed for the purposes of oppression and personal ambition.

There are no political prisoners, only imprisoned politicians.

… socialism is not a system for redistributing wealth but a system to control people and competitors

'Socialize' means we turn more of our personal powers over to Big Brother, not free enterprise.

When totalitarian regimes are established, they at least have the illusion of the single-minded purpose. But once they establish the stature that's necessary for a totalitarian regime, they tend to flail.

Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do.

Totalitarianism surpasses autocracy.

In many ways the rise of the state was the descent of the world from freedom to slavery

The State is the coldest of all cold monsters.

The divine impeccability of the immortal [Soviet] State turned out not only to have suppressed individual human beings but also to have defended them, to have comforted them in their weakness, to have justified their insignificance. The State had taken on its own shoulders the entire weight of responsibility; it had liberated people from the chimera of conscience.

[Ayn] Rand accepts that when she supports military conscription, even indirectly. Also, she starts her politics from the premise that the State must have police power. She fails to take into account the inevitability that once you start with police power you're going to have a police State.

Socialism is an attack on the right to breathe freely. No socialist system can be established without a political police.

The State has always one purpose: to limit, control, subordinate the individual and subject him to the general purpose Through its censorship, its supervision, and its police the State tries to obstruct all free activity and sees this repression as its duty, because the instinct of self-preservation demands it. The State does not permit me to use my thoughts to their full value and communicate them to other men unless they are its own Otherwise it shuts me up.

Look, America is no more a democracy than Russia is a Communist state. The governments of the U.S. and Russia are practically the same. There's only a difference of degree. We both have the same basic form of government: economic totalitarianism. In other words, the settlement to all questions, the solutions to all issues are determined not by what will make the people most healthy and happy in their bodies and their minds but by economics. Dollars or rubles.

A police state finds that it cannot command the grain to grow.

When a leader has deployed a private army, that is one definition of a police state. Another is when the president, or a leader, has his own treasury.

Tyranny seldom announces itself...In fact, a tyranny may exist without an individual tyrant. A whole government, even a democratically elected one, may be tyrannical.

When only cops have guns, it's called a "police state".

As political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends correspondingly to increase. And the dictator will do well to encourage that freedom...it will help to reconcile his subjects to the servitude which is their fate.

The seeds of totalitarian regimes are nurtured by misery and want.

The people = government doctrine is equivalent to political infantilism -- an agreement to pretend that the citizen's wishes animate each restriction or exaction inflicted upon him.