Authoritarianism Quotes

Putin was a former KGB intelligence officer who'd been stationed in East Germany at the Dresden headquarters of the Soviet secret service. Putin has said in interviews that he dreamed as a child of becoming a spy for the communist party in foreign lands, and his time in Dresden exceeded his imagination. Not only was he living out his boyhood fantasy, he and his then-wife also enjoyed the perks of a borderline-European existence. Even in communist East Germany, the standard of living was far more comfortable than life in Russia, and the young Putins were climbing KGB social circles, making influential connections, networking a power base.

The present was bright, and the future looked downright luminous.

Then, the Berlin wall fell, and down with it crashed Putin's world. A few days after the fall, a group of East German protestors gathered at the door of the secret service headquarters building. Putin, fearing the headquarters would be overrun, dialed up a Red Army tank unit stationed nearby to ask for protection. A voice on the other end of the line told him the unit could not do anything without orders from Moscow. And, "Moscow is silent," the man told Putin.

Putin's boyhood dream was dissolving before his eyes, and his country was impotent or unwilling to stop it. Putin despised his government's weakness in the face of threat. It taught him a lesson that would inform his own rule: Power is easily lost when those in power allow it to be tak ~ Matt Szajer

The Council is wrong. Yet, observe that none of us will risk telling it so, for fear of the consequences. ~ Mark Dunn

Authoritarianism is not pretending anymore to be a real alternative to democracy, but we can see many more authoritarian practices and styles basically being smuggled into democratic governments. ~ Ivan Krastev

The brilliance of this new type of authoritarianism is that instead of simply oppressing opposition, as had been the case with twentieth-century strains, it climbs inside all ideologies and movements, exploiting and rendering them absurd. ~ Peter Pomerantsev

I am not interested in having freedom from burdens.
I don't need any authority to free me from responsibility.
I am not interested in having freedoms within an authoritarian's parameters.
I am only interested in self-determination.
I have only respect for liberty as I am a libertarian. ~ A.E. Samaan

Off goes the head of the king, and tyranny gives way to freedom. The change seems abysmal. Then, bit by bit, the face of freedom hardens, and by and by it is the old face of tyranny. Then another cycle, and another. But under the play of all these opposites there is something fundamental and permanent - the basic delusion that men may be governed and yet be free. ~ H.L. Mencken

A Greek invention, democracy is highly overrated. For starters, it never worked in Greece. The first philosophers were fascists and, even today, 2,500 years later, the "cradle of Western civilization" remains an incompetent state. Roman emperors and a vengeful, authoritarian God are the true European success stories. ~ Thorsten J. Pattberg

It has always been asked in the spirit of: 'What are the best sources of our knowledge – the most reliable ones, those which will not lead us into error, and those to which we can and must turn, in case of doubt, as the last court of appeal?' I propose to assume, instead, that no such ideal sources exist – no more than ideal rulers – and that all 'sources' are liable to lead us into errors at times. And I propose to replace, therefore, the question of the sources of our knowledge by the entirely different question: 'How can we hope to detect and eliminate error?' The question of the sources of our knowledge, like so many authoritarian questions, is a genetic one. It asks for the origin of our knowledge, in the belief that knowledge may legitimize itself by its pedigree. The nobility of the racially pure knowledge, the untainted knowledge, the knowledge which derives from the highest authority, if possible from God: these are the (often unconscious) metaphysical ideas behind the question. My modified question, 'How can we hope to detect error?' may be said to derive from the view that such pure, untainted and certain sources do not exist, and that questions of origin or of purity should not be confounded with questions of validity, or of truth. …. The proper answer to my question 'How can we hope to detect and eliminate error?' is I believe, 'By criticizing the theories or guesses of others and – if we can train ourselves to do so – by criticizing our own theories or guesses.' ~ Karl Popper

We are at heart so profoundly anarchistic that the only form of state we can imagine living in is Utopian; and so cynical that the only Utopia we can believe in is authoritarian. ~ Lionel Trilling

Progress begins when you liberate your mind from the shackles of your ingrained tendencies of authoritarianism – the tendencies of greed – the tendencies of hatred, rage and lust. ~ Abhijit Naskar

The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries but between authoritarians and libertarians. ~ George Orwell

All of the virtues depend upon truth, and truth depends upon them all. Final truth in this world is unattainable, but its pursuit leads the individual away from unfreedom. The temptation to believe what feels right assails us at all times from all directions. Authoritarianism begins when we can no longer tell the difference between the true and the appealing. The cynic who decides that there is no truth is the citizen who welcomes the tyrant. ~ Timothy Snyder

Any religion-based state has a mission to limit the minds of its people, to fight the developments of history and logic, and to dumb down its citizens. It's important to stand in the way of such a mentality, to deny it from continuing its mission to murder the souls of its people, killing them deep within while they are still alive and breathing. ~ Raif Badawi

Confronted with the loving-sharing Consensus of subject-SUBJECT relationships all Authoritarianism must vanish. The Fairy Family Circle, co-joined in the shared vision of non-possessive love - which is the granting to any other and all others that total space wherein each may grow and soar to his own freely-selected, full potential - reaching out to one another subject-to-SUBJECT, becomes for the first time in history the true working model of a Sharing Consensus! ~ Harry Hay

No one will shake my conviction that those leaders of men, who are in the nature of carbuncles, of semi-conscious abscesses, who draw feverish crowds to them like noxious humours, have an innate knowledge of arrested time. They play with those vacant moments as though at a game of chequers. A fraction of suspended, frozen time, of inert time, jammed like a wedge into the most wonderfully oiled cogs of the most lucid of minds: and the whole mechanism is brought crashing to the ground, prepared to accept any authority, to endorse the most monstrous aberrations, especially collective ones. ~ Jacques Yonnet

But nothing surprises me now. I've grown used to living in a world that is out of joint, as if it has been struck by an enormous earthquake so that the roads are no longer flat, nor the building straight. ~ Philip Kerr

Finally, we arrive at the question of the so-called nonpolitical man. Hitler not only established his power from the very beginning with masses of people who were until then essentially nonpolitical; he also accomplished his last step to victory in March of 1933 in a "legal" manner, by mobilizing no less than five million nonvoters, that is to say, nonpolitical people. The Left parties had made every effort to win over the indifferent masses, without posing the question as to what it means "to be indifferent or nonpolitical."

If an industrialist and large estate owner champions a rightist party, this is easily understood in terms of his immediate economic interests. In his case a leftist orientation would be at variance with his social situation and would, for that reason, point to irrational motives. If an industrial worker has a leftist orientation, this too is by all mean rationally consistent - it derives from his economic and social position in industry. If, however, a worker, an employee, or an official has a rightist orientation, this must be ascribed to a lack of political clarity, i.e., he is ignorant of his social position. The more a man who belongs to the broad working masses is nonpolitical, the more susceptible he is to the ideology of political reaction. To be nonpolitical is not, as one might suppose, evidence of a passive psychic condition, but of a highly active attitude, a defense against the awareness of social responsibility. The analysis of th ~ Wilhelm Reich

The practical reason for freedom is that freedom seems to be the only condition under which any kind of substantial moral fiber can be developed we have tried law , compulsion and authoritarianism of various kinds, and the result is nothing to be proud of. ~ Albert J. Nock

The underlying narrative is that our political culture has been damaged because a demagogue has arisen and is leading people astray. If we accept this narrative (one that doesn't actually hold up to scrutiny), then we try to solve the problem of demagoguery in ways that worsen it: We call for purifying our public sphere of THEIR demagogues, often in very demagogic ways. That narrative misleads us because it reverses cause and effect. We don't have demagoguery in our culture because a demagogue has come to power; when demagoguery becomes the normal way of participating in public discourse, then it's just a question of time until a demagogue arises. ~ Patricia Roberts-Miller

But the secret of intellectual excellence is the spirit of criticism ; it is intellectual independence. And this leads to difficulties which must prove insurmountable for any kind of authoritarianism. The authoritarian will in general select those who obey, who believe, who respond to his influence. But in doing so, he is bound to select mediocrities. For he excludes those who revolt, who doubt, who dare to resist his influence. Never can an authority admit that the intellectually courageous, i.e. those who dare to defy his authority, may be the most valuable type. Of course, the authorities will always remain convinced of their ability to detect initiative. But what they mean by this is only a quick grasp of their intentions, and they will remain for ever incapable of seeing the difference. ~ Karl Popper

The only social change presented by most SF has been towards authoritarianism, the domination of ignorant masses by a powerful elite - sometimes presented as a warning, but often quite complacently. Socialism is never considered as an alternative, and democracy is quite forgotten. Military virtues are taken as ethical ones. Wealth is assumed to be a righteous goal and a personal virtue. Competitive free-enterprise capitalism is the economic destiny of the entire Galaxy. In general, American SF has assumed a permanent hierarchy of superiors and inferiors, with rich, ambitious, aggressive males at the top, then a great gap, and then at the bottom the poor, the uneducated, the faceless masses, and all the women. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

We now know that slavery was indefensible, that segregation was bad, that we should not have allowed eugenicists to forcibly sterilize sixty thousand people for being 'defective,' that Japanese internment was a ghastly breach of everything that America is supposed to be, that lynching 'uppity' non-whites is unquestionably evil, that sending Jews who had managed to escape Hitler's genocide back to Germany was an appallingly unethical thing to do. All of those things happened because people were persuaded by demagoguery; but, had they seen it as demagoguery, they wouldn't have been persuaded. So, demagoguery works when (and because) we don't recognize it as such. ~ Patricia Roberts-Miller

As one might expect, authoritarianism will at times cause children and students to adopt rebellious positions, defiant of any limit, discipline, or authority. But it will also lead to apathy, excessive obedience, uncritical conformity, lack of resistance against authoritarian discourse, self-abnegation, and fear of freedom. ~ Paulo Freire

The means of defence against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home. Among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a war, whenever a revolt was apprehended. Throughout all Europe, the armies kept up under the pretext of defending, have enslaved the people. ~ James Madison

Good design today requires more vision (a larger point of view versus the single brilliant idea), more consistency (a deeper underlying structure of language and form versus the simple, uniform application of visual elements) and more patience (persistence over time versus creative authoritarianism). ~ William Drenttel

There is no such thing as liberalism - or progressivism, etc.

There is only conservatism. No other political philosophy actually exists; by the political analogue of Gresham's Law, conservatism has driven every other idea out of circulation.

There might be, and should be, anti-conservatism; but it does not yet exist. What would it be? In order to answer that question, it is necessary and sufficient to characterize conservatism. Fortunately, this can be done very concisely.

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit:

There must be in-groups whom the law protectes but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

There is nothing more or else to it, and there never has been, in any place or time.

For millenia, conservatism had no name, because no other model of polity had ever been proposed. "The king can do no wrong." In practice, this immunity was always extended to the king's friends, however fungible a group they might have been. Today, we still have the king's friends even where there is no king (dictator, etc.). Another way to look at this is that the king is a faction, rather than an individual.

As the core proposition of conservatism is indefensible if stated baldly, it has always been surrounded by an elaborate backwash of pseudophilosophy, amounting over time to millions of pages. All such is axiomatically dishonest and undeserving of serious scr ~ Frank Wilhoit

Who is watching the Watchers? ~ James Hauenstein

Religiosity that is hostile to sex is the product of authoritarian society. ~ Wilhelm Reich

Dr Howell drank from the special cup which was tied around the handle with red cotton to distinguish the staff cups from those of the patients, and thus prevent the interchange of disease like boredom loneliness authoritarianism. ~ Janet Frame

Rule by decree has conspicuous advantages for the domination of far-flung territories with heterogeneous populations and for a policy of oppression. Its efficiency is superior simply because it ignores all intermediary stages between issuance and application, and because it prevents political reasoning by the people through the withholding of information. It can easily overcome the variety of local customs and need not rely on the necessarily slow process of development of general law. It is most helpful for the establishment of a centralized administration because it overrides automatically all matters of local autonomy. If rule by good laws has sometimes been called the rule of wisdom, rule by appropriate decrees may rightly be called the rule of cleverness. For it is clever to reckon with ulterior motives and aims, and it is wise to understand and create by deduction from generally accepted principles.

Government by bureaucracy has to be distinguished from the mere outgrowth and deformation of civil services which frequently accompanied the decline of the nation-state - as, notably, in France. There the administration has survived all changes in regime since the Revolution, entrenched itself like a parasite in the body politic, developed its own class interests, and become a useless organism whose only purpose appears to be chicanery and prevention of normal economic and political development. There are of course many superficial similarities between the two typ ~ Hannah Arendt

Another person's thoughts about you are outside of your jurisdiction; you have no authority. ~ Bryant McGill

Thus, as historian Soledad Loaeza has argued, the authoritarianism that distinguished Mexico during the second half of the 1960s should not be reduced to a series of "paranoid" acts of a single president (as Enrique Krauze and others have insisted). ~ Jaime Pensado

We begin the path toward defeating Mexico's real adversary, who represents authoritarianism and the worst antidemocratic practice, who represents a return to corruption as a system and impunity as conviction. That adversary is Pena Nieto and his party. ~ Josefina Vazquez Mota

30 or 40 of such voluntary gentlemen would do more in a day than 100 of the rest that must be press'd to it by compulsion. ~ John Smith

And is this not the very reason for the establishment of the State? If there were cause and reason for confidence among individuals, the State would never have come into existence. The sacred and essential foundation for the State is our mutual and well-founded suspicion of each other. Anyone questioning this foundation throws suspicion upon the State. ~ Karin Boye

Men in western governments who were themselves are often modern men, did not understand that freedom without chaos is not a magic formula which can be implanted anywhere. Rather, being modern men, it was their view that, because human race had evolved to a certain level by some such year as 1950, democracy could be planted anywhere from the outside. They had carefully closed their eyes to the fact that freedom without chaos had come forth from a Christian base. They did not understand that freedom without chaos could not be separated from its roots. ( ... ) Many countries where democracy has been imposed from the outside or from top downward, authoritarianism has increasingly become the rule of the day ~ Francis A. Schaeffer

Yet alongside this rebellion against the father, a respect for and acceptance of his authority continued to exist. This ambivalent attitude toward authority - rebellion against it coupled with acceptance and submission - is a basic feature of every middle-class structure from the age of puberty to full adulthood and is especially pronounced in individuals stemming from materially restricted circumstances. ~ Wilhelm Reich

We see pluralism: We can see that there are different ideological and political positions in Russia. If the authoritarianism finally ends, we will have real competition. ~ Nadezhda Tolokonnikova

The patriarchal authoritarian sexual order that resulted from the revolutionary processes of latter-day matriarchy (economic independence of the chief's family from the maternal gens, a growing exchange of goods between the tribes, development of the means of production, etc.) becomes the primary basis of authoritarian ideology by depriving the women, children, and adolescents of their sexual freedom, making a commodity of sex and placing sexual interests in the service of economic subjugation. From now on, sexuality is indeed distorted; it becomes diabolical and demonic and has to be curbed. In terms of patriarchal demands, the innocent sensuousness of matriarchy appears as the lascivious unchaining of dark powers. The Dionysian becomes "sinful yearning," which patriarchal culture can conceive of only as something chaotic and "dirty." Surrounded by and imbued with human sexual structures that have become distorted and lascivious, patriarchal man is shackled for the first time in an ideology in which sexual and dirty, sexual and vulgar or demonic, became inseparable associations. ~ Wilhelm Reich

Even the most humane and compassionate of the monotheisms and polytheisms are complicit in this quiet and irrational authoritarianism: they proclaim us, in Fulke Greville's unforgettable line, "Created sick Commanded to be well." And there are totalitarian insinuations to back this up if its appeal should fail. ~ Christopher Hitchens

In the authoritarian philosophy the concept of equality does not exist. The authoritarian character may sometimes use the word equality either conventionally or because it suits his purposes. But it has no real meaning or weight for him, since it concerns something outside the reach of his emotional experience. For him the world is composed of people with power and those without it, of superior ones and inferior ones. On the basis of his sado-masochistic strivings, he experiences only domination or submission, but never solidarity. Differences, whether of sex or race, to him are necessarily signs of superiority or inferiority. A difference which does not have this connotation is unthinkable to him. ~ Erich Fromm

To demonize state authoritarianism while ignoring identical albeit contract-consecrated subservient arrangements in the large-scale corporations which control the world economy is fetishism at its worst. ~ Bob Black

Whether in Bolshevism, Fascism, or Nazism, we meet continually with the forcible and ruthless usurpation of the power of the State by a minority drawn from the masses, resting on their support, flattering them and threatening them at the same time; a minority led by a charismatic leader and brazenly identifying itself with the State. It is a tyranny that does away with all the guarantees of the constitutional State, constituting as the only party the minority that has created it, furnishing that party with far-reaching judicial and administrative functions, and permitting within the whole life of the nation no groups, no activities, no opinions, no associations or religions, no publications, no educational institutions, no business transactions, that are not dependent on the will of the Government. ~ Wilhelm Ropke

They found records and video-cassettes at their place, a deck of cards, a chess set. In other words, everything that's banned. ~ Marjane Satrapi

National Socialism made use of various means in dealing with various classes, and made various promises depending upon the social class it needed at a particular time. In the spring of 1933, for example, it was the revolutionary character of the Nazi movement that was given particular emphasis in Nazi propaganda in an effort to win over the industrial workers, and the first of May was "celebrated," but only after the aristocracy had been appeased in Potsdam. To ascribe the success solely to political swindle, however, would be to become entangled in a contradiction with the basic idea of freedom, and would practically exclude the possibility of a social revolution. What must be answered is: Why do the masses allow themselves to be politically swindled? The masses had every possibility of evaluating the propaganda of the various parties. Why didn't they see that, while promising the workers that the owners of the means of production would be disappropriated, Hitler promised the capitalists that their rights would be protected? ~ Wilhelm Reich

Politically, we are still stuck in the systems of thought of the Greek and Roman slave states, no matter how much we rant about "democracy. ~ Wilhelm Reich

The hallmark of an authoritarian idiot is yelling TERRORIST-LOVER! at anyone questioning the definition of Terrorist. ~ Glenn Greenwald

The liberal state has no view on whether witchcraft is more valuable than all-in wrestling. Like a tactful publican, it has as few opinions as possible. Many liberals suspect passionate convictions are latently authoritarian. But liberalism should surely be a passionate conviction. Liberals are not necessarily lukewarm. Only the more macho leftist suspects that they have no balls. You can be ardently neutral, and fiercely indifferent. ~ Terry Eagleton

Weak logic, inconsistencies and alienation from the people are common features of authoritarianism. The relentless attempts of totalitarian regimes to prevent free thought and new ideas and the persistent assertion of their own lightness bring on them an intellectual stasis which they project on to the nation at large. Intimidation and propaganda work in a duet of oppression, while the people, lapped in fear and distrust, learn to dissemble and to keep silent. ~ Aung San Suu Kyi

Nothing prepares a people for authoritarianism better than defeat, followed closely by national humiliation and an economic implosion. ~ Yanis Varoufakis

That's how the world is arranged: they can take anyone's freedom from him, without a qualm. If we want to take back the freedom which is our birthright - they make us pay with our lives and the lives of all whom we meet on the way.
They can do anything, but we cannot. That's why they are stronger than we. ~ Georgi Tenno

Doing the forbidden is a normal function of growth. ~ Paul Goodman

Nothing is more dangerous than an atheist playing God. ~ J.S.B. Morse

A republic is not an easy form of government to live under, and when the responsibility of citizenship is evaded, democracy decays and authoritarianism takes over. ~ Earl Warren

Slogan For Humanity (The Sonnet)

Let's slogan for humanity above the cacophony of politics.
Let's slogan all together for the people and not bookish morality.
Let's slogan for humanity above the drumbeats of bigotry.
Let's slogan for the souls in misery and not nationality.
Let's slogan for humanity above the foghorn of policies.
Let's slogan cause we are responsible, not cause we're aggressive.
Let's slogan for humanity above the siren of world peace.
Let's slogan being peace incarnate beyond all doctrines illusive.
Let's slogan for humanity above the noise of traditions.
Let's slogan all together trumping all worship of sects.
Let's slogan for humanity above the gunshots of authoritarianism.
Let's slogan as just, free and brave beings, not loyal subjects.
Awake and Arise my sisters and brothers to slogan for all of humankind.
We are the light and we are the might that's needed during this ominous tide. ~ Abhijit Naskar

rabid distrust of what they consider authority without evidently once stopping to consider the rigid authoritarianism implicit in the rigid uniformity of their own quote unquote nonconformist uniform, vocabulary, attitudes ~ David Foster Wallace

Trump's dictatorial tendencies and mendacity, negative attributes for many voters, poised him perfectly to manipulate the evangelical mind. Like the biblical god evangelicals worship, Trump is a thin-skinned authoritarian with totalitarian tendencies. He craves love and punishes any disloyalty or slight. Evangelicals have been taught to worship and adore that type of being above all others. This strain of religion cultivates a veneration for extreme authority. Studies bear this out: religious fundamentalism and a tendency to submit to authoritarianism are highly correlated. Trump acted like the character evangelicals worship and benefited from their ingrained adulation. Evangelicals were simply seeing in Trump a character they'd been taught to revere. As if to prove the point, Ann Coulter called Trump her "Emperor God". ~ Andrew L. Seidel

He is against politics in general and longs for the restitution of the monarchy. They have seen nothing but rioting and inflation in the five years since Wilhelm II abdicated. And Ania knows not to mention the Communists. Her father has not recovered from the shock of their brief takeover of Bavaria, which, for a few weeks in 1919, became the Bavarian Soviet Republic. If he begins on the subject, no one will hear of anything else for days. For Doktor Fortzmann all was better under the kaiser. ~ Jessica Shattuck

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. ~ Salman Rushdie

to Vaneigem and the Situationists who by shrewd use of collage and juxtaposition exposed both the poverty and richness of slogans, and the thinly veiled hypocrisy of a "spectacular" society which by not respecting words abuses people, and by insulting the intelligence creates a state of political cretinisation in which the many and various forms of authoritarian control dominate. ~ Alexis Lykiard

Had Schleicher been successful in his leadership of the German government at the end of 1932, he would probably have headed a very moderate, essentially anti-Nazi form of nationalist authoritarianism that would have avoided a sharp break with the republican constitution and promoted a reflationary, reformist economic policy along Keynesian or New Deal lines to revive the economy and conciliate German society. ~ Stanley G. Payne

We need to enter the conversation willing to be wrong, willing to admit the limits of our own knowledge, willing to reconsider our evidence, sources, and premises. That is self-skepticism. ~ Patricia Roberts-Miller

Cultures define their gods when they're young and primitive, when their main concern is survival. They endow their gods with survival characteristics like omnipotence and authoritarianism, belligerence and suspicion, and that's what goes into all their myths or scriptures. Then, if they survive long enough, they begin to develop morality. They examine their own history, and they learn that authoritarianism doesn't accord with free will, that belligerence and suspicion are unhealthful, but this newly moral culture is stuck with its bigoted, interfering gods, plus it's stuck with people who prefer the old bloody gods and use them as their justification for doing all kinds of awful things. ~ Sheri S. Tepper

Authoritarianism, an unrealistic occidental imagination - these issues will never be settled. Turkey will continue to take Europe as a model; it will continue to pursue its search for democracy. ~ Orhan Pamuk

Even if Zuma was to develop the authoritarian impulses of a Mugabe, he would be checked - not least by his own party, which set a continental precedent by ousting Thabo Mbeki in 2007, after it felt he had outstayed his welcome by seeking a third term as party president. The ANC appears to have set itself against that deathtrap of African democracy: the ruler for life. ~ Mark Gevisser

There are also those who delusively if not enthusiastically surrender their liberty for the mastermind's false promises of human and societal perfectibility. He hooks them with financial bribes in the form of 'entitlements.' And he makes incredible claims about indefectible health, safety, educational, and environmental policies, the success of which is to be measured not in the here and now but in the distant future.
For these reasons and more, some become fanatics for the cause. They take to the streets and, ironically, demand their own demise as they protest against their own self-determination and for ever more autocracy and authoritarianism. When they vote, they vote to enchain not only their fellow citizens but, unwittingly, themselves. Paradoxically, as the utopia metastasizes and the society ossifies, elections become less relevant. More and more decisions are made by the masterminds and their experts, who substitute their self-serving and dogmatic judgments - which are proclaimed righteous and compassionate - for the the individual's self-interests and best interests. ~ Mark R. Levin

Should a woman keep her pants on in the streets or not? Shall she remove them, say, at the moment of going to church, for a more intimate reminder of her sexuality in relation to God? What difference does it make if that woman is a lemon vendor and sells you lemons in the streets without using underwear? Moreover, what difference would it make if she sits down to write theology without underwear? The Argentinian woman theologian and the lemon vendors may have some things in common and others not. In common, they have centuries of patriarchal oppression, in the Latin American mixture of clericalism, militarism and the authoritarianism of decency, that is, the sexual organisation of the public and private spaces of society. However, ~ Marcella Althaus-Reid

The reactionary of any kind condemns sexual pleasure because it stimulates and repulses him at the same time. He is unable to solve the conflict within him between sexual demands and moralistic inhibitions. The revolutionary refutes the perverse, unhealthy kind of pleasure, because it is not his kind of pleasure, because it is not the sexuality of the future, but the sexuality which results from the conflict between instinct and morals, the sexuality of authoritarian society, a debased, smutty, pathological sexuality. ~ Wilhelm Reich

Clarity of language is the first casualty of authoritarianism. ~ Robin Morgan

Pretty soon, I'll be decomposing into phosphorous, calcium, and so on. Who else will you find to tell you the truth? All that's left are the archives. Pieces of paper. And the truth is... I worked at an archive myself, I can tell you first hand: paper lies even more than people do. ~ Svetlana Alexievich

The courage of the authoritarian character is essentially a courage to suffer what fate or its personal representative or "leader" may have destined him for. To suffer without complaining is his highest virtue - not the courage of trying to end suffering or at least to diminish it. Not to change fate, but to submit to it, is the heroism of the authoritarian character. ~ Erich Fromm

the single ruling party remains in control while a wide range of conversations about the country's problems nonetheless occurs on websites and social-networking services. The government follows this online chatter, and sometimes people are able to use the Internet to call attention to social problems or injustices and even manage to have an impact on government policies. As a result, the average person with Internet or mobile access has a much greater sense of freedom - and may feel that he has the ability to speak and be heard - in ways that were not possible under classic authoritarianism. ~ Larry Diamond

The people in their overwhelming majority are so feminine by nature and attitude that sober reasoning determines their thoughts and actions far less than emotion and feeling.

And this sentiment is not complicated, but very simple and all of a piece. It does not have multiple shadings; it has a positive and a negative; love or hate, right or wrong, truth or lie, never half this way and half that way, never partially, or that kind of thing. ~ Adolf Hitler

It doesn't take an army to change the world, or an average-sized militia group, either. All it takes is one individual to say the word "No". Be it a man refusing to register for the draft, or be it a gun owner refusing to register his weapons in Connecticut, it is the same: defiance in the face of arbitrary authority. ~ Mike Klepper

The strengthening of our statehood is, at times, deliberately interpreted as authoritarianism. ~ Vladimir Putin

Even more essential, however, is the identification of the individuals in the masses with the "führer." The more helpless the "mass-individual" has become, owing to his upbringing, the more pronounced is his identification with the führer, and the more the childish need for protection is disguised in the form of a feeling at one with the führer. This inclination to identify is the psychological basis of national narcissism, i.e., of the self-confidence that individual man derives from the "greatness of the nation." The reactionary lower middle-class man perceives himself in the führer, in the authoritarian state. On the basis of this identification he feels himself to be a defender of the "national heritage," of the "nation," which does not prevent him, likewise on the basis of this identification, from simultaneously despising "the masses" and confronting them as an individual. The wretchedness of his material and sexual situation is so overshadowed by the exalting idea of belonging to a master race and having a brilliant führer that, as time goes on, he ceases to realize how completely he has sunk to a position of insignificant, blind allegiance.

The worker who is conscious of his skills - he, in short, who has rid himself of his submissive structure, who identifies with his work and not with the führer, with the international working masses and not with the national homeland - represents the opposite of this. He feels himself to be a leader, not on the basis of ~ Wilhelm Reich

Terror is a powerful means of policy and one would have to be a hypocrite not to understand this. ~ Leon Trotsky

Modernity, in contrast, is based on the firm belief that economic growth is not only possible, but absolutely essential... Modernity has turned 'more stuff' into a panacea applicable to almost all public and private problems, from religious fundamentalism through Third World authoritarianism down to a failed marriage... Economic growth has thus become the crucial juncture where almost all modern religions, ideologies and movements meet. ~ Yuval Noah Harari

James Glass, a political scientist at the University of Maryland who has studied the delusions of schizophrenia, writes, "Delusion provides a certain, often unbreakable identity, and its absolute character can maneuver the self into an unyielding position. In this respect, it is the internal mirror of political authoritarianism, the tyrant inside the self … an internal domination as deadly as any external tyranny. ~ Sylvia Nasar

Octavius Augustus became the first Roman emperor because the republic granted him enormous powers. And why did the republic do that? Why did it commit suicide to make way for an empire? Tacitus explains it thus: Cuncta fessa. Which means 'the whole world is tired.' Weariness in the face of political and social insecurity is what led to Rome losing its rights and freedoms. Fear induces a hunger for authoritarianism in people. Fear is a really bad adviser. And now look around you, Bruna: everyone's afraid. We're living in critical times. Our democratic system is also on the verge of suicide. Sometimes nations opt to throw themselves into the abyss. ~ Rosa Montero

The underlying problem is that we aren't arguing policies; we're arguing about identities, and therefore compromise is never considered a principled realization that they might have some legitimate concerns. It is, at best, a Machiavellian strategy forced on us by the bad group. ~ Patricia Roberts-Miller

The English Puritans were obsessed with the idea of providence, and that word is more ominous to them than it sounds to us. It means care, but it also means control. It does not just mean that God will provide. It means that God will provide whatever the hell God wants and the Puritans will thank him for it even if He provides them with nothing more than a slow death in a long winter. It means that if they're scared and small and lowly enough He just might toss a half-eaten corncob their way. It means that the world isn't fair and it's their fault. It means that God is the sovereign, the authority. It means manna from heaven, but it also means bow down. ~ Sarah Vowell

My guess is that the indignities imposed on so many low-wage workers - the drug tests, the constant surveillance, being "reamed out" by managers - are part of what keeps wages low. If you're made to feel unworthy enough, you may come to think that what you're paid is what you are actually worth. It is hard to imagine any other function for workplace authoritarianism. Managers may truly believe that, without their unremitting efforts, all work would quickly grind to a halt. That is not my impression. While I encountered some cynics and plenty of people who had learned to budget their energy, I never met an actual slacker or, for that matter, a drug addict or thief. On the contrary, I was amazed and sometimes saddened by the pride people took in jobs that rewarded them so meagerly, either in wages or in recognition. Often, in fact, these people experienced management as an obstacle to getting the job done as it should be done. ~ Barbara Ehrenreich

The libertarian can have no truck with 'left' or 'right' because he regrets any form of authoritarianism - the use of police force to control the creative life of man. ~ Leonard Read

Historians have a word for Germans who joined the Nazi party, not because they hated Jews, but out of a hope for restored patriotism, or a sense of economic anxiety, or a hope to preserve their religious values, or dislike of their opponents, or raw political opportunism, or convenience, or ignorance, or greed.


That word is "Nazi." Nobody cares about their motives anymore. ~ A.R. Moxon

Active loyalists do not merely support the president but publicly defend even his most controversial moves. Passive loyalists retreat from public view when scandals erupt but still vote with the president. Critical loyalists try, in a sense, to have it both ways. They may publicly distance themselves from the president's worst behavior, but they do not take any action (for example, voting in Congress) that will weaken, much less bring down, the president. In the face of presidential abuse, any of these responses will enable authoritarianism. ~ Steven Levitsky

It is [Simon] Wessely's often-unconcealed "derision" directed towards people with ME -- a disease from which people die and which appears on Coroners' death certificates as the cause of death -- which arouses such anger, an anger that is not confined to patients in the UK but encompasses medical scientists in other countries whose decision-makers have come under Wessely's thrall. ~ Michael Hanlon

The fascist authoritarianism, characterized by sado-masochism and destructiveness, had a function which is comparable psychologically to a neurotic symptom - namely, fascism compensated for powerlessness and individual isolation and protected the individual from anxiety-creating situations. If one compare fascism to a neurotic symptom, it can be said that fascism is a neurotic form of community. ~ Rollo May

When we've got these people who have practically limitless powers within a society, if they get a pass without so much as a slap on the wrist, what example does that set for the next group of officials that come into power? To push the lines a little bit further, a little bit further, a little bit further, and we'll realize that we're no longer citizens - we're subjects. ~ Edward Snowden

The rulers of your minds indulge in proverbs, but they've forgotten the main one, that love cannot be forced, and they have a deeply rooted habit of liberating people and making them happy, especially those who haven't asked for it. You probably fancy that there's no better place in the world for me than your camp and your company. I probably should even bless you and thank you for my captivity, for your having liberated me from my family, my son, my home, my work, from everything that's dear to me and that I live by. ~ Boris Pasternak

What, actually, is the difference between communism and fascism? Both are forms of statism, authoritarianism. The only difference between Stalin's communism and Mussolini's fascism is an insignificant detail in organizational structure. ~ Leonard Read

To proclaim 'America First' was to deny any need to fight fascism either at home or abroad. When American Nazis and white supremacists marched in Charlottesville in August 2017, Trump said that some of them were 'very fine people.' He defended the Confederate and Nazi cause of preserving monuments to the Confederacy. Such monuments in the American South were raised in the 1920s and 1930s, at a time when fascism in the United States was a real possibility; they memorialized the racial purification of Southern cities that was contemporary with the rise of fascism in Europe. Contemporary observers had no difficulty seeing the connection. Will Rogers, the great American entertainer and social commentator of his time, saw Adolf Hitler in 1933 as a familiar figure: 'Papers all state that Hitler is trying to copy Mussolini. Looks to me it's the KKK he's copying.' The great American social thinker and historian W.E.B. Du Bois could see how the temptations of fascism worked together with American myths of the past. He rightly feared that American whites would prefer a story about enmity with blacks to a reforming state that would improve prospects for all Americans. Whites distracted by racism could become, as he wrote in 1935, 'the instrument by which democracy in the nation was done to death, race provincialism deified, and the world delivered to plutocracy,' what we call oligarchy. ~ Timothy Snyder

In this county, we had to walk, eat, sleep and love in fear. ~ Herta Muller

Inevitability and eternity have specific propaganda styles. Inevitability politicians spin facts into a web of well-being. Eternity politicians suppress facts in order to dismiss the reality that people are freer and richer in other countries, and the idea that reforms could be formulated on the basis of knowledge. ~ Timothy Snyder

Even innocent people find themselves in trouble, Adolfina is innocent. We're all innocent. The only ones at fault for the bad things that are happening are the authorities. They with their way of being. Their behavior. Yes, the only ones who go to jail or end up wounded or dead along the roads are the poor. And that's because the authorities have a predilection--they know who to hassle. They exist to boss the poor around. To order the poor about, to beat up on the poor and to carry them off as if they were animals. Someday the good life they're living will end. Always doing it to the people, always. They've never suffered the slightest hurt. That's where they get their pride from. Once they're in uniform they think they're kings of the world, and they themselves say they're disposed to anything ~ Manlio Argueta

Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. ~ Timothy Snyder

The people in charge can always justify doing terrible things in the name of the greater good. A slaughter here, a little torture there. It becomes moral to do things that would be immoral if an ordinary individual did 'em. ~ Joe Hill

TWO AND TWO MAKES FIVE ~ George Orwell

Let us fool ourselves no longer. At the very moment Western nations, threw off the ancient regime of absolute government, operating under a once-divine king, they were restoring this same system in a far more effective form in their technology, reintroducing coercions of a military character no less strict in the organization of a factory than in that of the new drilled, uniformed, and regimented army. During the transitional stages of the last two centuries, the ultimate tendency of this system might b e in doubt, for in many areas there were strong democratic reactions; but with the knitting together of a scientific ideology, itself liberated from theological restrictions or humanistic purposes, authoritarian technics found an instrument at hand that h as now given it absolute command of physical energies of cosmic dimensions. The inventors of nuclear bombs, space rockets, and computers are the pyramid builders of our own age: psychologically inflated by a similar myth of unqualified power, boasting through their science of their increasing omnipotence, if not omniscience, moved by obsessions and compulsions no less irrational than those of earlier absolute systems: particularly the notion that the system itself must be expanded, at whatever eventual co st to life.

Through mechanization, automation, cybernetic direction, this authoritarian technics has at last successfully overcome its most serious weakness: its original dependence upon resistant, sometimes activ ~ Lewis Mumford

The fascist dictator declares that the masses of people are biologically inferior and crave authority, that basically, they are slaves by nature. Hence, a totalitarian authoritarian regime is the only possible form of government for such people. It is significant that all dictators who today plunge the world into misery stem from the suppressed masses of people. They are intimately familiar with this sickness on the part of masses of people. What they lack is an insight into natural processes and development, the will to truth and research, so that they are never moved by a desire to want to change these facts.

On the other hand, the formal democratic leaders made the mistake of assuming that the masses of people were automatically capable of freedom and thereby precluded every possibility of establishing freedom and self-responsibility in masses of people as long as they were in power. They were engulfed in the catastrophe and will never reappear.

Our answer is scientific and rational. It is based on the fact that masses of people are indeed incapable of freedom, but it does not - as racial mysticism does - look upon this incapacity as absolute, innate, and eternal. It regards this incapacity as the result of former social conditions of life and, therefore, as changeable. ~ Wilhelm Reich