Nina Hoss Quotes

Millions of people have to restore liberty and have to understand the danger and personal risk they face in a police state.

The more rulers strive to curtail freedom of speech, the more obstinately are they resisted; …. laws directed against opinions affect the generous minded rather than the wicked, and are adapted less for coercing criminals than for irritating the upright; so that they cannot be maintained without great peril to the state.

If the newspapers of a country are filled with good news, the jails of that country will be filled with good people.

We, the Desaparecidos, are perfectly prepared for people to hate what we're saying or not like what we're saying.

We know what totalitarian looks like, we know what oppression looks like, we know what the dumb culture of totalitarianism smells like. This is it! It's happening now, and the future of the world is being decided. So, get out there, make your own sites, take action!

In communist countries, you execute your poets. In the free world, the poets execute themselves.

It is foolish for people to think they can align themselves and be safe in a police state.

In this time when a citizenry applauds the liberation of a country as it lives in fear of its own freedom, when people all over the country fear reprisal if they use their right to free speech, it is time to get angry. It is time to get fierce.

I wouldn't perform in front of the Nazis. I hear they didn't take freedom of speech too well. It would be a fun gig to rip into them, but I don't think the ending would be great for me.

I think that people don't make the most of their lives. So, you know, for me, it seems like it's the beginning of me rattling the cage, of making some people nervous. And people are strategically trying to do things to mute my voice in some way or make me look like I'm a lunatic or pinpoint the inaccuracies in my grammar to somehow take away from the overall message of what I'm saying.

Decades of indoctrination, manipulation, censorship and KGB excursions haven't altered this fact: People want a piece of their own little Something-or-Other, and, if they don't get it, have a tendency to initiate counterrevolution.

When people think you are speaking against them as a group, they try to shut it down out here.

I was born under Communism. I know what it's like to live in a system where you can't speak, you have to whisper. Where the state is so pervasive and so intrusive.

If you say to people that they, as a matter of fact, can't protect their conversations, in particular their political conversations, I think you take a long step toward making a transition from a free society to a totalitarian society.

Our Press and our schools cultivate Chauvinism, militarism, dogmatism, conformism and ignorance. The arbitrary power of the Government is unlimited, and unexampled in history; freedom of the Press, of opinion and of movement are as thoroughly exterminated as though the proclamation of the Rights of Man had never been. We have built up the most gigantic police apparatus, with informers made a national institution, and the most refined scientific system of political and mental torture. We whip the groaning masses of the country towards a theoretical future happiness, which only we can.

I may boldly speak In right, though proud oppression will not hear me!

Let us refuse to be silent! Speaking freely is a decisive step forward on the road to freedom.

Because the Nazi venom worked its way even into our thoughts, every accurate thought was a conquest; because an all-powerful police sought to force us into silence every word became as precious as a declaration of principle; because we were persecuted, each of our gestures carried the weight of a commitment.

Every time you think, you weaken the nation.

When a church manipulates the law to say, "These people are lesser," it takes a lot of resilience to hold your head up and say, "I am not lesser!" Some people can do it and some cannot; and some of those people who cannot will be destroyed.

Where all your rights become only an accumulated wrong; where men must beg with bated breath for leave to subsist in their own land, to think their own thoughts, to sing their own songs, to garner the fruits of their own labours...then surely it is a braver, a saner and a truer thing, to be a rebel in act and deed against such circumstances as these than tamely to accept it as the natural lot of men.

Today's tragedy in Paris reminds us very viscerally that it's a right that some people are inexplicably forced to die for. So it's very important tonight that I express that everybody who works at our comedy show, all of us are terribly sad for the families and people of France and anybody in the world tonight who now has to think twice before making a joke. It's not the way it's supposed to be.

The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. And what country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms.

When people get frustrated, it's when they feel they are living in a context that deprives them of dignity, deprives them of justice and deprives them of the freedom to realize their full potential, and that to me is what the Arab awakening was all about. I think it applied to every country, and so I have been an unmitigated supporter of it.

I’m not going to censor myself to comfort your ignorance