Bernard Crick Quotes

A Study In Utopia and Dictatorship

One of the greatest advantages of the totalitarian elites of the twenties and thirties was to turn any statement of fact into a question of motive.

When you mix fashion and politics, you get fascism. Politics have fashion, and it's bad; fashion has politics, that are ugly.

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

It has been claimed at times that our modern age of technology facilitates dictatorship.

A demagogue is a person with whom we disagree as to which gang should mismanage the country.

The term Party is applied equally to the peaceful parties of America and to the Communist Party of Russia, the Nazi Party of Germany, and the Fascist Party of Italy. The methodology of these parties varies, but their fundamental objective-to place and keep their leaders in control of the government - is the same.

No truly sophisticated proponent of repression would be stupid enough to shatter the facade of democratic institutions.

Every dictator uses religion as a prop to keep himself in power.

There are many who do not know they are Fascists, but will find it out when the time comes.

As a Christian, I could never accept Communism. It is a crippling totalitarian disease.

All [political] parties, without exception, when they seek for power, are varieties of absolutism.

Their ideology requires them to get power but never give up power.

Spielberg, like many others, wants to convince before he discusses. In that, there is something very totalitarian.

Trump did not spring out of nowhere, and I was struck by how prescient writers like Alexis de Tocqueville and George Orwell and Hannah Arendt were about how those in power get to define what the truth is.

The radical Left wants control over the lives of the American people and will sink to any depths to get it.

We don't have an appreciable American left any more in the United States. What I saw of the SDS in the '60s was very abhorrent to me: Marxism, Leninism, almost the KGB mentality - a police politics that I found completely totalitarian in nature.

Unfortunately, in the world today, we have dogmatic people entering into politics. I don't think the two mix.

[Donald] Trump is fascism, that's all, so we have to find a way to work it out between Hillary [Clinton] and Bernie [Sanders].

Our fear that communism might someday take over most of the world blinds us to the fact that anti- communism already has.

Dictators never invent their own opportunities.

A government full of Democrats would rather have you be a Republican, and a government full of Republicans would rather have you be a Democrat, than have you oppose both.

The appalling reality in American politics today is that, when ideology and money mix, truth is a mere inconvenience.

The control of information is something the elite always does, particularly in a despotic form of government. Information, knowledge, is power. If you can control information, you can control people.

There are no generalizations in American politics that vested selfishness cannot cut through.