George Orwell Quotes

Dictators, unlike Democrats, depend on a small coterie to sustain their power. These backers, generally drawn from the military, the senior civil service, and family or clan members, have a synergistic relationship with their dictator. The dictator delivers opportunities for them to become rich, and they protect him from being overthrown.

The Communist Party apparatus was the most gigantic mafia the world has ever known.

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.

Fear generates anger, and fear generates violence, and those were part of what built the Saudi state.

The Federal Government is exploiting public fear to redefine the relationship between the rulers and the American people.

It is well known that the Soviet Union closely regulates all organizations and movements, including religion.

I'd never been in a police state. I didn't know what it was. I knew that it was, in the general way that people know that two and two is four, but it had no emotional value for me until I found myself in the middle of it.

The great strength of the totalitarian state is that it forces those who fear it to imitate it.

If the Soviet Union let another political party come into existence, they would still be a one-party state, because everybody would join the other party.

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

Arab governments, at the end of the day, care most about remaining in power.

In the Soviet Union, you always have the feeling someone is watching you.

Were we ever to find ourselves living under a totalitarian regime, place no faith in the mercy of your fellow citizens.

In authoritarian societies, control over the production, distribution, and circulation is generally in the hands of the government, or what might be termed traditional modes of political sovereignty. But in neoliberal societies, sovereignty is often in the hands of major corporations that now have power over not only the production of knowledge but also over the implementation of policies that bear down on matters of life and death, living and surviving.

We know what totalitarian looks like, we know what oppression looks like, we know what the dumb culture of totalitarianism smells like. This is it! It's happening now, and the future of the world is being decided. So, get out there, make your own sites, take action!

All power rests on hierarchy: An army is nothing but a well-organized lynch mob.

The great enemy of any totalitarian regime is normalization and trade.

Putin doesn't conduct elections in the Western sense of elections. This is more accurately probably described as a plebiscite, where people are supposed to express their support for him. The Russian system is not unique in this respect, but it is rather interesting. Here, in the West, the impression that people have is that Putin runs the whole country. This is not so, at all. To a certain extent, you could say that he runs the Kremlin, and this means that it's, in some situations, hard to tell whether it's him running the Kremlin, or the people around him running him.

The dictatorship of the Communist Party is maintained by recourse to every form of violence.

The supreme mystery of despotism, its prop and stay, is to keep men in a state of deception, and with the specious title of religion to cloak the fear by which they must be held in check, so that they will fight for their servitude as if for salvation.

In a society like this there is no negotiation, no discussion, except to tell you that power can crush you any time they want — not only you, your whole family and all people like you.

Religion has been a powerful weapon in the hands of governments, in the hands of priests, in the hands of kings who have used it as a weapon to keep down the populace. It is a wonderful way of disciplining people and making them do what you want, to tell them that if they don't do what you want they will, for example, go to Hell.

The object of the state is always the same: to limit the individual, to tame him, to subordinate him, to subjugate him.

A regime that wraps itself in the flag of truth fears truth most of all, for if its story is falsified to the slightest degree, its authority is gone.