Naomi Wolf Quotes

For 73 years a totalitarian regime ruled the country. Totalitarian regime.

Maintaining legitimacy in an authoritarian state is very difficult.

Totalitarianism surpasses autocracy.

The most common characteristic of all police states is intimidation by surveillance. Citizens know they are being watched and overheard. Their mail is being examined. Their homes can be invaded.

That, in its essence, is Fascism — ownership of Government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.

Socialism is an attack on the right to breathe freely. No socialist system can be established without a political police.

Churchill knew instinctively what was wrong with communism - that it repressed liberty; that it replaced individual discretion with state control; that it entailed the curtailment of democracy, and therefore that it was tyrannous.

Totalitarianism spells simplification: an enormous reduction in the variety of aims, motives, interests, human types, and, above all, in the categories and units of power.

In Stalin each [Soviet bureaucrat] easily finds himself. But Stalin also finds in each one a small part of his own spirit. Stalin is the personification of the bureaucracy. That is the substance of his political personality.

That is one of the characteristics of fascism, the idea that the state can provide all of the answers for everyone.

Right now, we have no possibility of politics because we have a one-party state.

Every one of the world's dictatorships can and does claim to be acting in the name of the people.

In the 1980s, in the communist Eastern Germany, if you owned a typewriter, you had to register it with the government. You had to register a sample sheet of text out of the typewriter. And this was done so the government could track where text was coming from.

Africa has more dictators per capita than any other continent.

It is poor civic hygiene to install technologies that could someday facilitate a police state.

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.

I've met quite a few dictators up close and personal in my life.

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 government of a single person is no assurance of a stable and tranquil government.

The army and the government needs a dictator.

The whole administrative, judicial, and legislative machinery obeys a single will, the caprice of General Porfirio Diaz, who during his long administration has shown that the principal motive that guides him is to maintain himself in power and at any cost.

Standing armies are the oppressive instruments for governing the people.

I cannot say that our country could have no secret police without becoming totalitarian, but I can say with great conviction that it cannot become totalitarian without a centralized national police.

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

In Belarus, the government is a kind of presidential monarchy with no checks, no balances, and no rule of law.