Helen Dunmore Quotes

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

A state that suppresses all freedom of speech, and which by imposing the most terrible punishments, treats each and every attempt at criticism, however morally justified, and every suggestion for improvement as plotting to high treason, is a state that breaks an unwritten law.

When despots rule, cartoonists die.

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

Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard.

The principle of evil in Europe is the enervating spirit of Russian absolutism.

He killed his enemies because he was afraid they would kill him. Amin ordered entire tribes to be put to death, because he feared they would rebel.

Nondemocratic regimes imperil the security of the world. They stay in power by controlling their populations. This control invariably requires an increasing amount of repression. To justify this repression and maintain internal stability, external enemies must be manufactured.

Political or religious dissenters are the plague of every totalitarian regime.

An attempt to scrutinize men’s thoughts and punish their opinions is of all kinds of despotism the most odious: yet this is peculiarly character of a period of revolution.... There is no period more at war with the existence of liberty.

The National Socialist Party will prevent in the future, by force if necessary, all meetings and lectures which are likely to exercise a depressing influence on the German state.

Tyranny in the modern world is most visible in German militarism and the Armenian massacres (By Turkey)

Soviet repression taught the Russians that hope and trust are dangerous, inimical, and treacherous

You agreed with the Dear Leader or you died or ended up in Camp 913.

The Chinese are good at repression and can be pretty ruthless about it.

Just as Chairman Mao and Joseph Stalin started by going after the intellectuals, against those whose words who might form an opposition to them, so Trump has gone across us. Free speech is first among equals when we look at what is being violated by this new regime.

In their efforts to discredit human freedom, the Putinites denounce the sins that may occur under the reign of liberty with the same ardor, the same sincerity, and the same purpose that animated their Soviet forebears.

Like most dictators, Col Gaddafi detests the metropolis. His vision of Libya is a kind of Bedouin romantic medievalism, suspicious of universities, theatres, galleries and cafes, and so monitors the cities' inhabitants with paranoid suspicion.

Every dictatorship has ultimately strangled in the web of repression it wove for its people, making mistakes that could not be corrected because criticism was prohibited.

...any form of government that required the repression, imprisonment, and execution of those who disagreed with it was certainly not a government of the people.

The climax of terror is reached when the police state begins to devour its own children, when yesterday's executioner becomes today's victim.

Dictatorship and authentic literature are incompatible... The writer is the natural enemy of dictatorship.

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

The chains of military despotism, once fastened upon a nation, ages might pass away before they could be shaken off.

Just the minute the FBI begins making recommendations on what should be done with its information, it becomes a Gestapo.