A. N. Wilson Quotes

In my speeches, I always condemned communism, national-socialism and fascism.

Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda.

It could be that all awful dictators are frustrated artists - Mao with his poetry and Mussolini with his monuments. Stalin was once a journalistic hack, and I can personally testify to how frustrated they are. Pol Pot left a very edgy photo collection behind. And Osama seems quite interested in video.

It is a paradox that every dictator has climbed to power on the ladder of free speech. Immediately on attaining power each dictator has suppressed all free speech except his own.

Totalitarianism is patriotism institutionalized.

The one thing with writing stories about the rise of fascism is that if you wait long enough, you'll almost certainly be proved right. Fascism is like a hydra - you can cut off its head in the Germany of the '30s and '40s, but it'll still turn up on your back doorstep in a slightly altered guise.

I've always been fascinated by totalitarian regimes. I'm not an admirer of them.

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.

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

Every movement that seeks to enslave a country, every dictatorship or potential dictatorship, needs some minority group as a scapegoat which it can blame for the nation's troubles and use as a justification of its own demands for dictatorial powers.

To a certain extent, all dictatorships are alike. From Stalin's Soviet Union to Mao's China, from Ceauşescu's Romania to Saddam Hussein's Iraq, all these regimes had the same trappings ... But Kim Il-sung took the cult of personality to a new level. What distinguished him in the rogues' gallery of twentieth-century dictators was his ability to harness the power of faith. Kim Il-sung understood the power of religion.

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

In some states militant nationalism has gone to the lengths of dictatorship, the cult of the absolute or totalitarian state and the glorification of war.

Corporate nationalism to me is a little bit like what would have happened if Hitler had won. It's scary stuff. It's totalitarianism in a different from, under a different flavour.

Fascism is not defined by the number of its victims, but by the way it kills them.

Kim Jong-un's style is more suggestive of Saddam Hussein or his murderous son, Uday Hussein.

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

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

They have been talking about a dictatorship and they were right because there's a dictatorship and there's a government that has been fighting that dictatorship, the dictatorship of the media.

Fascism is not the result of dictatorship.

'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.

I am told the Cheney-Bush team dislikes their junta being compared to the Nazis. If they ceased behaving like Nazis, no comparison would come to mind.

I have no desire to go in for tyranny or to play the part of King Charles. I hate tyranny in any field of human activity.

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.

We tend to think about fascism in terms of the Second World War.