Neil Gaiman Quotes

Communism may be over as an economic system, but as a model of state domination, it is very much alive in the People's Republic of China and in Putin's police state.

It is a violation which has obsessed the tyrants of the twentieth century. They do not want simply to kill their opponents, but to liquidate them, to deny that they have ever existed.

Any society where it's a crime or a hassle to be different is a society based on psychological fascism.

When the FBI adopts the tactics of the Soviet Union and Hitler's Gestapo, it's time for the Director no longer to be the Director.

The limits of tyrants are proscribed by the endurance of those whom they suppress.

Enemy of the People

Santa Fe is a quiet little town, and is kept clean and in good order. The governor, Lopez, was common soldier at the time of the revolution, but has now been seventeen years in power. This stability of government is owing to his tyrannical habits, for tyranny seems as yet better adapted to these countries than republicanism. The governor’s favorite occupation is hunting Indians …

Either you were opposed to the growth of Fascism and went out to fight against it, or you acquiesced in its crimes and permitted its growth.

Modernization vastly increased the power of the state. It gave the rulers new tools—the powers of indoctrination, surveillance, and repression.

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

When despots rule, cartoonists die.

Loss of freedom seldom happens overnight. Oppression doesn’t stand on the doorstep with toothbrush moustache and swastika armband—it creeps up insidiously ... step by step …

When the tyranny of the state is combined with the hypocrisy of the church, you have a modern example of the twin vultures that have devoured man, and his rights, throughout the ages.

It is not only under Nazi rule that police excesses are inimical to freedom. It is easy to make light of insistence on scrupulous regard for the safeguards of civil liberties when invoked on behalf of the unworthy. It is too easy. History bears testimony that by such disregard are the rights of liberty extinguished, heedlessly at first, then stealthily, and brazenly in the end.

People always suffer for what governments have done.

Every movement that seeks to enslave a country, every dictatorship or potential dictatorship, needs some minority group as a scapegoat which it can blame for the nation's troubles and use as a justification of its own demands for dictatorial powers.

In the years before its victory in 1949, the [Communist] Party newspapers were constantly criticizing the Chiang Kai-shek regime for repression of free speech, and often issued loud appeals on behalf of persecuted voices of conscience.

The punishment for new thought or expressing a different opinion is death

Tyrants and dictators have incited hatred against ethnic and religious minorities for centuries in order to consolidate power for themselves.

One thing my father said was that if you find yourself in a country where you have to carry papers, you know it has a lousy government.

Nothing more threatens Vladimir Putin than not being able to track his own citizens.

To put it in plain language, Russia is that country where the name of a writer appears not on the cover of his book, but on the door of his prison cell.

If you know anything about Ethiopia, they are very security conscious, a very closed environment. It's a repressive place were journalists and bloggers are arrested all the time.

A pattern has developed under the Maduro regime. When pressure builds, the first recourse is to repress and persecute. I know this because buckshot pellets fired by members of the armed forces - at peaceful protesters in 2017 - remain lodged in my own body. A minor price to pay compared to the sacrifices made by some of my compatriots.

We know that Maduro's armies are riddled with persecution, torture, threats, and wrongful arrests.