Marjane Satrapi Quotes

None of the evils which totalitarianism ... claims to remedy is worse than totalitarianism itself.

I grew up in Taiwan, which was a military dictatorship.

India is one vast prison with high walls of suppression clothing her mind and her body.

For the past several years, I have remained what others would consider underground. I did this in order to build a community of people, like-minded in their desire for freedom and the right to pursue their goals and lives without being manipulated and controlled by a media protected military industrial complex with a completely different agenda.

Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think.

Growing up in Pakistan in the 1980s, I lived in the shadow of a tyrannical state.

The individual's desire to dominate his environment is not a desirable trait in a society which every day grows more and more confining.

Dictators free themselves, but they enslave the people.

Some people still believe you should just fall in line with what's going on - and that's scary. It makes a mockery of freedom of speech.

I should like to underline: no people, no country, in which a Communist dictatorship has been established, ever found its way out of it.

I grew up in a dictatorship in East Africa.

It is remarkable how easily children and grown-ups adapt to living in a dictatorship organised by lunatics.

I lived in a dictatorship in Brazil, and I was arrested three times. I felt in my flesh what it is to live under such a regime and experience deprivation of freedom.

Within the Russian system, everything depends on the character of those few who hold full power in their hands. The position of the individual within present-day Russia has been described as follows: far-reaching economic security by sacrificing personal liberty.

To defend society from sex is no one's business. To defend it from officiousness is the duty of everyone who values freedom—or sex.

Communism of every type and stripe brings with it an ideological straight jacket. Thought control, brain-washing, censorship, imprisonment, exile, mental and physical torture are the indispensable weapons of Communist rule.

A State which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes—will find that with small men, no great thing can really be accomplished.

With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men's labor ... Each of the things is, by the respective party, called by two different and incompatible names—liberty and tyranny.

I hold this project to be totally subversive of the last remains of English liberty …. Can it be pretended, that by the knowledge of our number, or our wealth, either can be increased?" And what purpose will it answer to know where the kingdom is crowded, and where it is thin, except we are to be driven from place to place as graziers do their cattle? If this be intended, let them brand us at once; but while they treat us like oxen and sheep, let them not insult us with the name of men

A totalitarian society makes enormous demands on the courage of men, and a partially totalitarian society makes even greater demands because the general anxiety is greater.

In an over-organized society, the individual is altogether crushed out of existence. He gains the whole wealth of social thought around him and loses his own soul.

… the mortal enemy of liberty

A dictatorship breeds distrust.

The one indisputable reality of dictatorship is that dissent, insult, and malevolent language do not go unpunished if it is allowed at all.

When the president decides that he knows better than you know what's good for you or your family, we've got trouble in this country.