Vasily Grossman Quotes

In contrast, fear societies are societies in which dissent is banned.

People may believe that there can be a society where dissent is not permitted, but which is nonetheless not a fear society because everyone agrees with one another and therefore no one wants to dissent.

Hero-worship is strongest where there is least regard for human freedom.

Communism was something so hideous that you had to be an exceptional conformist or a fool not to see the evil around you.

The difference between being out of step with a dictator and being out of step with the democratic majority is practically negligible. The important thing is to be in step.

Civilization after civilization, it is the same. The world falls to tyranny with a whisper. The frightened are ever keen to bow to a perceived necessity, in the belief that necessity forces conformity, and conformity a certain stability. In a world shaped into conformity, dissidents stand out, are easily branded and dealt with. There is no multitude of perspectives, no dialogue. The victim assumes the face of the tyrant, self-righteous and intransigent, and wars breed like vermin. And people die.

But if by some freak of history communism had caught up with this country, I would have been one of the first people thrown in jail.

A new type of superstition has got hold of people's minds, the worship of the state. People demand the exercise of the methods of coercion and compulsion, of violence and threat. Woe to anybody who does not bend his knee to the fashionable idols!

For an entire populace, change, growth, and spontaneity were dangerous. Acting upon a personal desire, whispering a hidden longing, revealing your true feelings - all the human actions we think of as essential to a character - had be censored by the self lest they be punished by the state.

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.

Fear, conformity, immorality: these are heavy burdens. They drain us of creative energy. And when we are drained of creative energy, we do not create. We procreate, but we do not create.

Persecution is the first law of society because it is always easier to suppress criticism than to meet it.

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.

It is difficult to violently suppress people in the long run, as the example of the Soviet Union and the Eastern European countries has shown.

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

The first people totalitarians destroy or silence are men of ideas and free minds.

A functioning police state needs no police.

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

I think one of the very frightening things about the regime of the National Socialists is that it made people happy.

The worst thing our Communists could do to us, and the thing we have most to fear from their activities, is that we should become like them.

A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves.

It’s often safer to be in chains than to be free.

Weak natures have to be told that it simply means "to be [with the Nazi Party] or not to be [at all].

Whatever crushes individuality is despotism.

There will always be authorities who try to make their own lives more comfortable by suppressing critical comment.