Jung Chang Quotes

On the face of it, China has won the Olympics. But it is not China that has won, but the Communist party. The Chinese people have lost.

If the communist party is controlling China, they represent China.

To be a member of the Communist Party is to have a taste of the police state. It is a diluted taste but is bitter and unforgettable.

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.

I was Chairman Mao's dog. Whomever he told me to bite, I bit.

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

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.

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

In the case of Stalinism, people actually distorted science because it was for the good of the Communist Party.

Stalinism is linked with a cult of personality and massive violations of the law, with repression and camps. There is nothing like that in Russia and, I hope, will never again be.

Oceania was at war with Eurasia; therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.

Singling out political opponents for working against the ruling party is precisely the tactic of every tyrannical government from Red China to Venezuela. The first step in the process is creating unfounded public suspicion of political opponents, followed by arresting and jailing any who continue speaking against the regime.

Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear, a sense of the imminence of takeover by aliens and real diseases are useful material.

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.

In 1948 the first severe crash occurred in my life when Stalin put out his decree on 'formalism.' There was a bulletin board in the Moscow Conservatory. They posted the decree, which said Shostakovich's compositions and Prokofiev's were no longer to be played.

I grew up in a dictatorship in East Africa.

When you repeat, in that wooden and perfunctory way, that our situation is better than others, that we're 'well-placed to weather the storm', I have to tell you that you sound like a Brezhnev-era apparatchik giving the party line.

Seventy years ago this November, Vladimir Lenin created the modern totalitarian state, transforming simpler forms of tyranny into history's most sophisticated apparatus of rule by terror.

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.

Sasha, aren’t you a good communist? How can you allow so much ideological freedom? Do something!.

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.

Trotsky appeared later and after assembling Foreign Office force, announced himself Minister for Foreign Affairs whereupon entire force declined to serve and left department which is now closed, not even responding to telephone calls. Only department responding to telephone is Ways of Communication but Minister of Ways of Communication imprisoned.

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.

Political correctness is the natural continuum from the party line. What we are seeing once again is a self-appointed group of vigilantes imposing their views on others. It is a heritage of communism, but they don't seem to see this.

My father, Charles Seeger, got me into the Communist movement. He backed out around '38. I drifted out in the '50s. I apologized for following the party line so slavishly, for not seeing that Stalin was a supremely cruel misleader.