Authoritarian Control Quotes

Why should I nationalize the industry. I shall nationalize the people.

The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. His heart sank as he thought of the enormous power arrayed against him, the ease with which any Party intellectual would overthrow him in debate, the subtle arguments which he would not be able to understand, much less answer. And yet he was in the right! They were wrong and he was right.

The economic disasters of socialism and communism come from assuming a blanket superiority of those who want to run a whole economy.

It's easier to control people when they're afraid.

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

The peculiar danger of executive power is that it executes.

Liberty has meaning only if we still believe in it when terrible things happen and a false government security blanket beckons.

Woe to that nation whose literature is disturbed by the intervention of power. Because that is not just a violation against "freedom of print," it is the closing down of the heart of the nation, a slashing to pieces of its memory.

Socialism and communism are set up so that a select few elite get most of everything and the rest of society is equally miserable in poverty and oppression. So if you can be in the ruling party elite, socialism, communism, you've got it made. That's less than one half of one-tenth a percent of the population in those countries.

By giving the government unlimited powers, the most arbitrary rule can be made legal; and in this way a democracy may set up the most complete despotism imaginable.

There's no such thing as going to a soapbox and saying, 'The government's corrupt,' and not having the intelligence service see your face. In the digital world, that can be done.

Government means always coercion and compulsion and is by necessity the opposite of liberty.

For out of such an ungoverned populace one is usually chosen as a leader, someone bold and unscrupulous who curries favor with the people by giving them other men's property. To such a man the protection of public office is given, and continually renewed. He emerges as a tyrant over the very people who raised him to power.

A liberal society cannot be defended by herbivores. We need carnivores to save us, but we had better make sure the meat-eaters hunt only on our orders.

Where love stops, power begins, and violence, and terror

[Socialistic] economic planning, regulation, and intervention pave the way to totalitarianism by building a power structure that will inevitably be seized by the most power-hungry and unscrupulous.

If it's not accepted that big government, fiat money, ignoring liberty, central economic planning, welfarism, and warfarism caused our crisis, we can expect a continuous and dangerous march toward corporatism and even fascism with even more loss of our liberties.

Shut up, be happy. Obey all orders without question. The happiness you have demanded is now mandatory.

I order you to hold a free election but forbid you to elect any but Richard [d'Ilchester.]

When I ordered my royal penitent to do or to leave undone anything, under penalty of mortal sin, I was obeyed;

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 term Big Brother is from George Orwell's book 1984 - where everyone's watched over by a network of cameras called Big Brother. I've never understood why Orwell chose that phrase for somebody watching you all the time. Isn't that more like Creepy Uncle?

Nothing has ever been more insupportable for a man and a human society than freedom. –The Grand Inquisitor

Hitler's dictatorship was the first of an industrial estate in this age of modern technology, a dictatorship which employed to perfection the instruments of technology to dominate its own people. By means of such instruments of technology, eighty million persons could be made subject to the will of one individual. Telephone, teletype, radio, made it possible to transmit the commands of the highest levels directly to the lowest organs where they were executed uncritically

The police force has repeatedly demonstrated an inability and unwillingness to carry out its fundamental mandate: to serve and protect the people of Hong Kong. It has been reduced to a mere instrument of repression subservient to the political agenda of Beijing's regime in Hong Kong.