We appreciate your coming to us with a copy of your letter to your sister, but it was unnecessary. Your offense was known to us even before the letter's receipt by your sister. Effective as of September 15 the primary responsibility of our isle's new assistant chief postal inspector has been to scan all post for use of illegal letters of the alphabet, then to make nightly reports to the Council. A report has been put on file on your behalf, your official sentence to be forthwith in issuance.
Mark DunnTag: censorship totalitarianism
Caution in handling generally accepted opinions that claim to explain whole trends of history is especially important for the historian of modern times, because the last century has produced an abundance of ideologies that pretend to be keys to history but are actually nothing but desperate efforts to escape responsibility.
Hannah ArendtTag: history antisemitism historians totalitarianism communism ideology marxism 1968 final-solution race-theory sophism
I love my country, not my government.
Jesse VenturaTag: liberty freedom nationalism patriotism patriotic government totalitarianism police-state constitution ron-paul bill-of-rights despotism libertarianism allegiance patriot jesse-ventura martial-law
In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable—what then?
George OrwellTag: perspective totalitarianism brainwashing
Well, as Hannah Arendt famously said, there can be a banal aspect to evil. In other words, it doesn't present always. I mean, often what you're meeting is a very mediocre person. But nonetheless, you can get a sort of frisson of wickedness from them. And the best combination of those, I think, I describe him in the book, is/was General Jorge Rafael Videla of Argentina, who I met in the late 1970s when the death squad war was at its height, and his fellow citizens were disappearing off the street all the time. And he was, in some ways, extremely banal. I describe him as looking like a human toothbrush. He was a sort of starch, lean officer with a silly mustache, and a very stupid look to him, but a very fanatical glint as well. And, if I'd tell you why he's now under house arrest in Argentina, you might get a sense of the horror I felt as I was asking him questions about all this. He's in prison in Argentina for selling the children of the rape victims among the private prisoners, who he kept in a personal jail. And I don't know if I've ever met anyone who's done anything as sort of condensedly horrible as that.
Christopher HitchensTag: evil dictatorship rape totalitarianism 1970s argentina jorge-rafael-videla banality-of-evil hannah-arendt hitch-22
I used to call myself a single-issue voter on the essential question of defending civilization against its terrorist enemies and their totalitarian protectors, and on that 'issue' I hope I can continue to expose and oppose any ambiguity.
Christopher HitchensTag: politics united-states totalitarianism islam 2008 terrorism war-on-terror islamism united-states-elections-2008 politics-of-the-united-states
The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect.
George OrwellTag: language totalitarianism 1984 socialism george-orwell
If you can feel that staying human is worth while, even when it can't have any result whatever, you've beaten them.
George OrwellTag: politics totalitarianism 1984 socialism george-orwell
It was sometimes feebly argued, as the political and military war against this enemy ran into difficulties, that it was 'a war without end.' I never saw the point of this plaintive objection. The war against superstition and the totalitarian mentality is an endless war. In protean forms, it is fought and refought in every country and every generation. In bin Ladenism we confront again the awful combination of the highly authoritarian personality with the chaotically nihilist and anarchic one. Temporary victories can be registered against this, but not permanent ones. As Bertold Brecht's character says over the corpse of the terrible Arturo Ui, the bitch that bore him is always in heat. But it is in this struggle that we develop the muscles and sinews that enable us to defend civilization, and the moral courage to name it as something worth fighting for.
Christopher HitchensTag: war nihilism superstition totalitarianism authoritarianism war-on-terror osama-bin-laden islamism war-in-afghanistan-2001 al-qaeda bertold-brecht
Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.
Noam ChomskyTag: democracy totalitarianism propaganda repression mass-media
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