Richard Dawkins Quotes

Nothing for the Left, nothing the government does is ever about its superficial reason; it's only and always about expanding government power and control over you.

When state and religion are one, religion becomes a means for the powerful to remain in power.

In despotic statecraft, the supreme and essential mystery be to hoodwink the subjects, and to mask the fear, which keeps them down, with the specious garb of religion, so that men may fight as bravely for slavery as for safety, and count it not shame but highest honor to risk their blood and their lives for the vainglory of a tyrant;

When the people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called "the People's Stick.

Extensive and organized power over large populations does not suffice to make a nation

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

The worst forms of tyranny, or certainly the most successful ones, are not those we rail against but those that so insinuate themselves into the imagery of our consciousness, and the fabric of our lives, as not to be perceived as tyranny.

It's easier to control people when they're afraid.

A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.

It is hard for power to enjoy or incorporate humour and satire in its system of control.

If you think of yourselves as helpless and ineffectual, it is certain that you will create a despotic government to be your master. The wise despot, therefore, maintains among his subjects a popular sense that they are helpless and ineffectual.

Many Communist government officials have a rigid, dictatorial power, but they live in constant suspicion and fear of anything that might undermine the power they have.

When people say 'let's do something about it', they mean 'let's get hold of the political machinery so that we can do something to somebody else.' And that somebody is invariably you.

If it be said that the consent of the strongest party in a nation, is all that is necessary to justify the establishment of a government that shall have authority over the weaker party, it may be answered that the most despotic governments in the world rest upon that very principle, viz.: the consent of the strongest party.

Authoritarian systems evolve. Authoritarianism in the Internet Age is not your old Cold War authoritarianism.

Pervading nationalism imposes its dominion on man today in many different forms and with an aggressiveness that spares no one. The challenge that is already with us is the temptation to accept as true freedom what in reality is only a new form of slavery.

One of the main ways that leadership stays in power is by, in various ways, convincing people that they should just let those who are in government govern: 'Trust us. Trust me. Just let us take care of things. Stay out of it.' Your opinions don't really matter. You are isolated. You are insignificant.

And this is the Anarchistic definition of the State: the embodiment of the principle of invasion in an individual, or a band of individuals, assuming to act as representatives or masters of the entire people within a given area.

The Thought Police: To censor and protect.

Religion was used as an ideology, as a system of control. When they forced the veil upon women, they were using it as an instrument of control in the same way that in Mao's China people were wearing Mao jackets and women were not supposed to wear any makeup.

Remember that this White house is populated with … control freaks.

Either force or corruption has been the principle of every modern government.

The state is an instrument in the hands of the ruling class for suppressing the resistance of its class enemies.

A new kind of slavery will emerge. It will probably adopt the cruelest form of domination the community could impose upon the individual and the state upon the community.

Popery and Slavery, like two sisters, go hand in hand, sometimes one goes first. Sometimes the other, in a door, but the other is always following close at hand.