Herta Muller Quotes

It seems to be that when these communist regimes take over - if you look at the example of Vietnam or Cambodia or Nicaragua - that even in conditions of peace they don't seem to be able to figure out how to support their people, and the human suffering is enormous.

I grew up with communism, and if you live through communism you don't love it.

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

There are, of course, all sorts of other unpleasant regimes outside the walls as well - the military dictators of Latin America and the apartheid regime of South Africa.

If I were dictator, I'd have a catch-all crime of disrespect.

I came from a communist country where there are no luxury cars.

The saddest country I went to was Romania, years ago, during Ceausescu's rule.

Never will the Anarchists in Spain be made to suffer as they have been and are in Russia.

All of North Korea is a jail.

I'd never been in a police state. I didn't know what it was. I knew that it was, in the general way that people know that two and two is four, but it had no emotional value for me until I found myself in the middle of it.

I lived under the Nazis and under the Communists.

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

I can still smell the tear gas in the Hilton Hotel.

Most Hungarians know what it was to live in a dictatorship; some are old enough to have known both fascism and communism. No one wants to go back to that.

It is remarkable how easily children and grown-ups adapt to living in a dictatorship organised by lunatics.

I hate to say it but I was glad when they shot him. I don’t believe in terrorism or assassination but he could have become the American dictator.

This is the only country in the world where a dictator will be allowed to sit among a democratically elected Congress. Everywhere else evil dictators go into exile.

The guilt of Stalin and his immediate entourage before the Party and the people for the mass repressions and lawlessness they committed is enormous and unforgivable.

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

De Gaulle has all the characteristics to be a dictator.

… the unfortunate but inevitable connection between the word “socialism” and the unmitigated crucifixion of Civil Liberties in the East [Eastern Europe dominated by the Russian Communist Party.

Since he took power over half a century ago, Fidel Castro proved to be a brutal dictator who must always be remembered by his gross abuses of human rights, systemic exploitation of Cubans, unrelenting repression, and stifling censorship upon his own people.

In any authoritarian society, the possessor of power dictates, and if you try and step outside, he will come after you. This is equally true of Sovietism, of China and of Iran, and in our time it has happened a lot in Islam. The point is that it's worse when the authoritarianism is supported by something supernatural.

Saddam Hussein admired, studied, and copied Stalin, the paragon of modern dictators.

The only thing the East German system taught us was that we should never do it that way again.