Richard Corliss Quotes

Only a minority of science fiction dystopias attempt to plumb the real existential roots of oppression, the flaws in humanity's nature that undermine our best attempts at organizing ourselves into social units.

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

Man has set man against man, Washed against unwashed.

War and unrest appeal to me more than good bourgeois order. Brutality is respected, the people need wholesome fear. They want to fear someone. They want someone to frighten them and make them shudderingly submissive.

There is no room any more for the divisive agenda which has been sought to be foisted on the common man.

What makes 'The Handmaid's Tale' so terrifying is that everything that happens in it is plausible.

When I was a kid, there were really only two possible futures in the foreground, which were Orwell's '1984' and Huxley's 'Brave New World'.

The human race is divided horizontally by age, vertically by sex and diagonally by race

A totalitarian society makes enormous demands on the courage of men, and a partially totalitarian society makes even greater demands because the general anxiety is greater.

the latent causes of faction [which causes men] to vex and oppress each other.

When the people are sheep, the government is always a wolf.

Sit down, you socialist

If we define an American fascist as one who in case of conflict puts money and power ahead of human beings, then there are undoubtedly several million fascists in the United States. There are probably several hundred thousand if we narrow the definition to include only those who in their search for money and power are ruthless and deceitful.

…to make a commonwealth is to divide it into parties, which setteth them at perpetual variance, the one party endeavouring to preserve their eminence and inequality, and the other to attain their equality.

Nothing can be more repugnant to the individualism and love of freedom of the British race than the Hindu caste system, under which every man is born into a particular water-tight compartment from which he cannot emerge except through death and rebirth …

Certain sections of the upper classes abroad, identifying conservatism with mere material repression, are given to praising Signor Mussolini

It is necessary to be very intelligent in the work of oppression.

Do you believe that the German middle class, this flower of the intelligentsia, would refuse to serve us and put their minds at our disposal?... We will do what we like with the German middle class.

The extremes of society are being driven further and further apart.

The subjection of individuals will increase amongst democratic nations, not only in the same proportion as their equality, but in the same proportion as their ignorance.

Our showy celebration of, and absolute insistence upon, individual autonomy and unconstrained diversity pushes those by nature least equipped to live comfortably in a liberal democracy not to the limits of their tolerance, but to their intolerant extremes.

If apartheid is removed, then the violence that is necessary to maintain it will be removed along with the pressures from apartheid which create a violent response.

Think about George Orwell's three-minute hate from the novel '1984' and how that left everyone sort of exhausted and able to live their boring humdrum lives. If our lives are going to continue being unfulfilled and boring, perhaps we do need some sort of short-term violent chaos incorporated into them, to make them more palatable.

When the state was going to tell you what your future would be, science fiction was irrelevant.

'1984' is terrifyingly relevant. It generates a political conversation, but it's an exciting piece of theatre. Every day, there are things to be spawned from Orwell's mind, whether it's in England or America, terrorist-related or government-related.