Christopher Hitchens Quotes

Concentrated power has always been the enemy of liberty.

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.

When a government takes over a people's economic life, it becomes absolute, and when it has become absolute, it destroys the arts, the minds, the liberties and the meaning of the people it governs.

The revolutionary government is the despotism of liberty

Secrecy is the freedom tyrants dream of.

Tyranny is always better organized than freedom.

Whatever crushes individuality is despotism, by whatever name it may be called and whether it professes to be enforcing the will of God or the injunctions of men.

Every tyrant who has lived has believed in freedom for himself.

The more laws that governments pass, the less individual freedom there is. Any student of history will tell you that. Totalitarian countries ban pretty much everything.

Only the freedom of mind can prevent the state from becoming totalitarian and from issuing totalitarian demands.

Tyrannies not only want to control your mind and thoughts but your flesh as well.

I have no desire to go in for tyranny or to play the part of King Charles. I hate tyranny in any field of human activity.

Next thing you know they'll take your thoughts away.

You can't become a dictator through checks and balances.

It is from weakness that people reach for dictators and concentrated government power. Only the strong can be free. And only the productive can be strong.

In all tyrannical governments the supreme magistracy, or the right both of making and of enforcing the laws, is vested in one and the same man, or one and the same body of men; and whenever these two powers are united together, there can be no public liberty.

The one reason we know that every totalitarian government must fail is that no totalitarian government is prepared to face the consequence of free universities.

In an absolute government there can be no... equiponderant parties. The despot is the government.

Founded upon a constitution which jealously withheld from it nearly all the powers of government, without even the poor privilege of existing beyond the moment when some one of the States composing it should see fit to put it to death, the Richmond government nevertheless grew speedily into a despotism, and for four years wielded absolute power over an obedient and uncomplaining people. It tolerated no questioning, brooked no resistance, listened to no remonstrance. It levied taxes of an extraordinary kind upon a people already impoverished almost to the point of starvation. It made of every man a soldier, and extended indefinitely every man's term of enlistment. Under pretense of enforcing the conscription law it established an oppressive system of domiciliary visits. To preserve order and prevent desertion it instituted and maintained a system of guards and passports, not less obnoxious, certainly, than the worst thing of the sort ever devised by the most paternal of despotisms. In short, a government constitutionally weak beyond all precedent was able for four years to exercise in a particularly offensive way all the powers of absolutism, and that, too, over a people who had been living under republican rule for generations.

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

One need only watch totalitarians at work to see that once men gain power over other men’s minds, that power is never used sparingly and wisely, but lavishly and brutally and with unspeakable results.

There's nothing to fear. I'm not a dictator.

I would be opposed to any kind of totalitarian control.

Napoleon - the people who were becoming Napoleon's generals realized that for him, it was not about spreading freedom and revolution; it was about creating a new empire with Napoleon the dictator or the emperor.

Dictatorship is a constant lecture instructing you that your feelings, your thoughts and desires are of no account, that you are a nobody and must live as you are told by other people who desire and think for you