Olga Tokarczuk Quotes

We live in a sea of semantic disorder in which old labels no longer faithfully describe. Police states are called "people's democracies." Armed conquest of free people is called "liberation.

Television has made dictatorship impossible but democracy unbearable.

Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.

Propaganda is to a democracy what violence is to a dictatorship.

It's true, too, that I'm tired of using books as political bullets and grenades. Books are too precious and wonderful to be used for long in such a fashion.

The right can distort anything it wants.

These censorship people think something is going to promote behavior in people.

Of course, I grew up in Communist Romania, but I am happy to say that now our country is democratic, and prospering, since the revolution in 1989.

Some of mankind's most terrible misdeeds have been committed under the spell of certain magic words or phrases.

If you don't want a man unhappy politically, don't give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none.

... the Kremlin ought to put McCarthy on its payroll.

I couldn't get published for three years. Then the times changed: glasnost, perestroika. So, for three years, I wasn't allowed to publish 'The Unwomanly Face of War,' but then it changed.

The point of Left-wing propaganda is to make us feel powerless.

Media is a double-edged sword and has the power to change hearts and minds through authentic storytelling as well as the power to paint a person, or an entire community, in a dim and misleading light.

The media is controlled.

The 'politics of memory' policy appears to work largely by insinuation.

Once you have some sort of reputation in the outside world, they will try to woo you. They will say, "Won't you come and be on a talk program about books? That's not political." Then they can say to the outside world, "See how free it is, she appears on television. See how free it is." So I refused to have anything of mine read or dramatized on South African television.

I think: the powers like to talk about "freedom" in order to wash the population's brains.

The current flows fast and furious. It issues in a spate of words from the loudspeakers and the politicians. Every day they tell us that we are a free people fighting to defend freedom. That is the current that has whirled the young airman up into the sky and keeps him circulating there among the clouds. Down here, with a roof to cover us and a gasmask handy, it is our business to puncture gasbags and discover the seeds of truth.

The real struggle is not between East and West, or capitalism and communism, but between education and propaganda.

As Pa said, censorship encouraged people to believe nonsense.

You must continue. Poets are the ones who change the world.

The road to tyranny, we must never forget, begins with the destruction of the truth.

I cannot think of a country in which I would be happy with the government and dominant ideology and available propaganda.

I try to counter what Donald Trump says that might have an effect on somebody.