#totalitarian

Nos instruyen y preparan en la juventud para una profesión, para cumplir los deberes ciudadanos, para el servicio militar, nos enseñaban las reglas del aseo, a comportarnos bien y hasta a comprender lo bello (esto último no tanto). Pero la instrucción, la educación, la experiencia, no nos preparan en absoluto para la gran prueba de nuestra vida: para el arresto por nada y para el sumario sobre nada. ↗

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#totalitarianism #totalitarianism

As persons, so Mournier maintained, we possess both a spiritual and temporal dimension; we exist in history, in relationship with others, but open to transcendence and ultimately to God. This concept of the person, he believed, was denied as much by an atheistic totalitarianism of the Left as by the bourgeois materialism of capitalist society. To the extent that Christianity had become infected by the bourgeois spirit, it had become a prop in what he called, 'the established disorder. ↗

— Robert Ellsberg

#totalitarianism

Not even the most heavily-armed police state can exert brute force to all of its citizens all of the time. Meme management is so much subtler; the rose-tinted refraction of perceived reality, the contagious fear of threatening alternatives. ↗

— Peter Watts

#marketing #memes #perception-of-reality #power #totalitarianism

Only the freedom of mind can prevent the state from becoming totalitarian and from issuing totalitarian demands. ↗

— Friedrich Durrenmatt

#demands #freedom #issuing #mind #only

The Chinese art world does not exist. In a society that restricts individual freedoms and violates human rights, anything that calls itself creative or independent is a pretence. It is impossible for a totalitarian society to create anything with passion and imagination. ↗

— Ai Weiwei

#art #art world #calls #chinese #create

The totalitarian, to me, is the enemy - the one that's absolute, the one that wants control over the inside of your head, not just your actions and your taxes. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#actions #control #enemy #head #inside

The great strength of the totalitarian state is that it forces those who fear it to imitate it. ↗

— Adolf Hitler

#forces #great #imitate #state #strength

The savior who wants to turn men into angels is as much a hater of human nature as the totalitarian despot who wants to turn them into puppets. ↗

— Eric Hoffer

#despot #hater #human #human nature #into

But there is a big difference in working for the West and working for a totalitarian state. ↗

— John le Carre

#big difference #difference #state #totalitarian #totalitarian state

Totalitarian states killed with impunity and no one was held accountable. That didn't happen in the West. ↗

— John le Carre

#happen #held #impunity #killed #states