Steven Erikson Quotes

Whatever crushes individuality is despotism, by whatever name it may be called and whether it professes to be enforcing the will of God or the injunctions of men.

A state of society where men may not speak their minds cannot long endure.

In contrast, fear societies are societies in which dissent is banned.

It is difficult to violently suppress people in the long run, as the example of the Soviet Union and the Eastern European countries has shown.

Whatever crushes individuality is despotism.

When fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.

No society has gone the way of gulags or concentration camps by following the path of Spinoza and Einstein and Jefferson and Thomas Paine

There is fascism, leading only into the blackness which it has chosen as its symbol, into smartness and yapping out of orders, and self-righteous brutality, into social as well as international war. It means change without hope. Our immediate duty - in that tinkering which is the only useful form of action in our leaky old tub - our immediate duty is to stop it.

The enemies of freedom do not argue; they shout and they shoot.

A lasting order cannot be established by bayonets.

All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.

If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.

A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.

Because if you lived, as I did, several years under Nazi totalitarianism, and then 20 years in communist totalitarianism, you would certainly realize how precious freedom is, and how easy it is to lose your freedom.

A dissenting minority feels free only when it can impose its will on the majority: what it abominates most is the dissent of the majority.

Fascism is fascism. Terrorism is terrorism. Oppression is oppression.

Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings.

People may believe that there can be a society where dissent is not permitted, but which is nonetheless not a fear society because everyone agrees with one another and therefore no one wants to dissent.

The stability and security of authoritarian regimes cannot create but terrorism and violence and destruction. Let us accept the choice of the people. Let us not pick and choose who we would like to rule their future.

Death solves all problems - no man, no problem.

Once you permit those who are convinced of their own superior rightness to censor and silence and suppress those who hold contrary opinions, just at that moment the citadel has been surrendered.

Hero-worship is strongest where there is least regard for human freedom.

Freedom of speech is always under attack by Fascist mentality, which exists in all parts of the world, unfortunately.

There never yet has been a great system sustained by force under which all the best faculties of men have not slowly withered.

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.