Eric Hoffer Quotes

It is well known that in the Communist countries, and especially in my own, Albania, readers were often called upon to demonstrate their vigilance by detecting and denouncing the 'errors' of authors.

The National Socialist Party will prevent in the future, by force if necessary, all meetings and lectures which are likely to exercise a depressing influence on the German state.

Spend most of the day reading fascisti pamphlets. They certainly have turned the whole country into an army. From cradle to grave one is cast in the mould of fascismo and there can be no escape…. It is certainly a socialist experiment in that it destroys individuality. It also destroys liberty.

The Soviet Union was a one-party state. In such states, enemies of the party become enemies of the state, and the state can punish with full weight of prosecution.

The real evil of the Russian communist state is not communism. It is the secret police and the concentration camp.

All through human history, tyrannies have tried to enforce obedience by prohibiting disrespect for the symbols of their power. The swastika is only one example of many in recent history.

Our age has seen the birth of totalitarian systems and forms of tyranny which would not have been possible in the time before the technological leap forward.

Even the most repressive regimes seek to maintain the fiction that they have the people’s interest at heart.

No socialist system can be formed without some form of political police – a Gestapo

Fig leaves of democratic procedure … hide the nakedness of Stalinist dictatorship

In its mad passion for power, the Communist State even sought to strengthen and deepen the very ideas and conceptions which the Revolution had come to destroy. It supported and encouraged all the worst antisocial qualities and systematically destroyed the already awakened conception of the new revolutionary values

With the suppression of all political parties, the bases were laid for the totalitarian state.

Since he took power over half a century ago, Fidel Castro proved to be a brutal dictator who must always be remembered by his gross abuses of human rights, systemic exploitation of Cubans, unrelenting repression, and stifling censorship upon his own people.

In any authoritarian society, the possessor of power dictates, and if you try and step outside, he will come after you. This is equally true of Sovietism, of China and of Iran, and in our time it has happened a lot in Islam. The point is that it's worse when the authoritarianism is supported by something supernatural.

The tyranny of Communism is as old as the Pharaohs and the Pyramids - that the State stands above all men and their individual aspirations.

The U.S.S.R. was a totalitarian state in which judges and prosecutors were controlled by the ruling party. The result was injustice, oppression and corruption.

Political dictatorships take possession not just of money and belongings but of narrative.

In their efforts to discredit human freedom, the Putinites denounce the sins that may occur under the reign of liberty with the same ardor, the same sincerity, and the same purpose that animated their Soviet forebears.

Totalitarianism is not about some state that appears out of nowhere and suddenly is all-powerful. There can't be any such thing. Totalitarianism starts when the difference between your public life and your private life is effaced.

When totalitarian regimes are established, they at least have the illusion of the single-minded purpose. But once they establish the stature that's necessary for a totalitarian regime, they tend to flail.

The North Korean regime really can control people. I think they are the best dictator in the whole planet.

In the Franco era, we couldn't defend our ideas.

Modern totalitarianism can be defined as the establishment, by means of the state of exception, of a legal civil war that allows for the physical elimination not only of political adversaries but of entire categories of citizens who for some reason cannot be integrated into the political system

The perfect fascist state needs to operate in conditions of perpetual warfare. Have you ever noticed how the world has been in constant crisis since World War II?

One thing that all the totalitarian states did was make the great leader's face everywhere.