Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

I'm not comparing Bush to Adolf Hitler - because George Bush, for one thing, is not as smart as Adolf Hitler.

Are there any monuments built to demagogues? I just don't think so.

She had much in common with Hitler, only no mustache.

If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.

After the many rumours that we had heard about Hitler and the published criticisms we had read about him, we were pleasantly impressed. His appearance was neither pretentious nor affected.

If you read about Mussolini or Stalin or some of these other great monsters of history, they were at it all the time, that they were getting up in the morning very early. They were physically very active. They didn't eat lunch.

… bootlickers of Hitler

Like Hitler’s Brownshirts, the Christian Front was ostensibly organized to combat the ‘rising tide of Communism.’ All Jews,... liberals, New Dealers and labor organizations were called Communist; and since the Communist Revolution in America was scheduled to take place ‘any day now,’ the Christian Front–always under Coughlin’s inspiration and guidance—shouted that a private army was the only means to ‘save America.’ Coughlin filled the pages of Social Justice with Hitler’s sewer-spawned lies. He made direct use of Goebbels’ speeches, quoting the Nazi almost word-for-word.... He denounced the ‘poppycock of Democracy’ and branded Democracy as a version of Communism

Hitler has become Chancellor… It’s like a fairy tale come true.

The present political situation is almost comic, diabolically comic, if one has enough detachment to see it that way: the whole of Europe waiting with bated breath for the “inspired” utterances of a madman! Everything seems to depend on what Hitler will say … all this flurry and nervous chatter in the international henroosts, -- because of the lunatic whims of a paranoiac little mediocrity of a German housepainter!

The worst of all states is the people's state.

I would rather vote for Hitler.

Our democracy is but a name. We vote? What does that mean? It means that we choose between two bodies of real, though not avowed, autocrats. We choose between Tweedledum and Tweedledee.…

In comparison to Hitler we are all pip-squeaks. Anyone who believes he can do better than the Führer is stupid.

Hitler and his clique conquered Germany by brutal violence, by murder and crime. But the doctrines of Nazism had got hold of the German mind long before then. Persuasion, not violence, had converted the immense majority of the nation to the tenets of militant nationalism. If Hitler had not succeeded in winning the race for dictatorship, somebody else would have won it.

The Fuehrer is not just a lunatic. The weapons in his armory are like nothing in history. His propaganda is sophisticated. His control of the people is technologically clever. He has torn up the military textbook, and written his own.

In power for 16 years now, Mr. Putin and his global propaganda machine aggressively promote the idea that democracy is a chaotic mess that only the hero Putin can save Russia from falling into.

Speech has never defeated fascism.

Fact check: The examples of failed socialism that critics use are not socialist democracies but authoritarian states led by corrupt, ruthless, and paranoid dictators.

Donald Trump ran for autocrat, he didn't run for president. The first thing in autocrat does is take over the media, or alienate the media, which is what Trump is doing, he is doing it actively.

The aspiring tyrants of today have not forgotten the lesson of 1933: that acts of terror - real or fake, provoked or accidental - can provide the occasion to deal a death blow to democracy.

Hitler is no worse, nay better, in my opinion, than the other lugs. He makes the German mistake of being tactless, that's all.

The other day, someone told me the difference between a democracy and a people's democracy. It's the same difference between a jacket and a straitjacket.

Mussolini was the greatest political leader of the century.

Tayyip Erdogan wants to go beyond George W. Bush by making critical journalism and critics in the academy illegal. What will be the difference between him and a military government? Very little. I read his remarks on the effectiveness of Adolf Hitler as Chancellor of Germany. Well, yes. But then the AKP would have to ban all other political parties, close down all critical newspapers, burn the books critical of the regime and gas the Kurds to death...the final solution of the Kurdish 'problem.' Somehow I don't think he is about to do that.