Lu Xun Quotes

...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 greatest threat to the security of the people of North Korea comes from the government of North Korea.

Open your newspaper - any day of the week - and you will find a report from somewhere in the world of someone being imprisoned, tortured or executed because his opinions or religion are unacceptable to his government.

We [Arabs] export not only oil but techniques and tools of torture. Our states, run by ministries of the interior and the security services, are regimes bereft of legitimacy and based on violations of dignity and human rights.

The effects of U.S. intervention in Latin America have been overwhelming negative. They have had the effect of reinforcing brutal and unjust social systems and crushing people who are fighting for what we would actually call “American values.” In many cases, … we actually overthrew governments that had principles similar to ours and replaced those … leaders with people who detest everything the United States stands for.

Despotic governments do not recognize the precious human component of the state, seeing its citizens only as a faceless, mindless -- and helpless -- mass to be manipulated at will. It is as though people were incidental to a nation rather than its very life-blood.

In more than half the nations of our world, torture certifies that the form of government is tyranny. Only tyranny, no matter how camouflaged, needs and employs torturers. Torture has no ideology.

The worst criminals of our time are the US and UK governments. Both are devoid of all integrity, all honor, all mercy, all humanity. Many members of both governments would have made perfect functionaries in Stalinist Russia or Nazi Germany.

The State is the coldest of all cold monsters.

the greater the bureaucratization of public life, the greater will be the attraction of violence. In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left with whom one can argue, to whom one can represent grievances, on whom the pressures of power can be exerted. Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless we have a tyranny without a tyrant.

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

Tyranny seldom announces itself...In fact, a tyranny may exist without an individual tyrant. A whole government, even a democratically elected one, may be tyrannical.

For me, Stalinism was even a greater philosophical problem than Nazism. Under Nazism, if you were a Jew, you were simply killed, no questions asked, you had nothing to prove. Under Stalinism, of course, most [victims] were on trial for false accusations; most of them were not traitors. There is one interesting feature: that they were tortured or through some kind of blackmail forced to confess to being traitors.

In the Soviet Union you weren't allowed to speak out against the government. In the US you cannot speak out against sponsors.

The sole motivating factor behind the death penalty is vengeance, not justice, and I firmly believe that a government that forbids killing among its citizens should not be in the business of killing people itself.

Between a tyrant and a prince there is this single or chief difference, that the latter obeys the law and rules the people by its dictates, accounting himself as but their servant.

Whenever citizens are seen routinely as enemies of their own government, writers are rountinely seen to be the most dangerous enemies.

Putin needs to terrorize his own elite. He is more afraid of those in his own surroundings than any protests; there are people there who are at least as critical as I am because they see up close that the system doesn't work. He wants to silence them.

The State, every government whatever its form, character or color - be it absolute or constitutional, monarchy or republic, Fascist, Nazi or bolshevik - is by its very nature conservative, static, intolerant of change and opposed to it.

Vladimir Putin is a human rights abuser, responsible for deaths in Ukraine, Georgia and Syria, not to mention curious murders of his political opponents and journalists.

The purpose and function of government is not to preside over change but to prevent change. By political methods when unavoidable, by violence when convenient.

To commit violent and unjust acts, it is not enough for a government to have the will or even the power; the habits, ideas and passions of the time must lend themselves to their committal.

The essence of government is force, and most often that force is used to accomplish evil ends.

State violence operating under the guise of personal safety and security, while parading as a bulwark of democracy, actually does the opposite and cancels out democracy as the incommensurable sharing of existence that makes the political possible.

Nearly all of Latin America, from Chile to Mexico, is one long rack of torture. Financed, equipped, and refined by the U.S. government.