“The individual is handicapped by coming face-to-face with a conspiracy so monstrous he cannot believe it exists. The American mind simply has not come to a realization of the evil which has been introduced into our midst. It rejects even the assumption that human creatures could espouse a philosophy which must ultimately destroy all that is good and decent.”
John Edgar Hoover
“Every four years it elects the Bundestag. The lists or persons submitted to it by the parties are already elected beforehand by the parties. The process of this hidden preliminary election, which is the actual election, is convoluted; the names for the constituency lists and the state lists are not drawn up in the same way. But it is always the party committees, never the people, who would be involved in this decisive beginning. One must be a party member in order to participate somewhere in this election and to be able to be set up. Even those who are party members, as such, have little effect in the nominations. The decisive factor is the party hierarchy and bureaucracy.[…] Even the elections are not really elections, but acclamations to the party oligarchy. [….] The parties, which should by no means be the state, make themselves, withdrawn from the life of the people, the state [….] The governance of the state is in the hands of the party oligarchy [….] Their position, not limited by any tension to other power, seduces [….] the parties to want to occupy the seats by their own people. This is the reward for party work, the spoils of victory after the electoral battle [….]”
Karl Jaspers
“When government fears the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny.”
Thomas Jefferson
“If you can feel that staying human is worth while, even when it can’t have any result whatever, you’ve beaten them.”
George Orwell
“It’s not so much staying alive, it’s staying human that’s important. What counts is that we don’t betray each other.”
George Orwell
“The whole drift of our law is toward the absolute prohibition of all ideas that diverge in the slightest form from the accepted platitudes, and behind that drift of law there is a far more potent force of growing custom, and under that custom there is a natural philosophy which erects conformity into the noblest of virtues and the free functioning of personality into a capital crime against society.”
Henry Louis Mencken
“These people don’t see that if you encourage totalitarian methods, the time may come when they will be used against you instead of for you.”
George Orwell
“Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.”
Bertrand Russell
“Impersonal forces over which we have almost no control seem to be pushing us all in the direction of the Brave New Worldian nightmare; and this impersonal pushing is being consciously accelerated by representatives of commercial and political organizations who have developed a number of new techniques for manipulating, in the interest of some minority, the thoughts and feelings of the masses.”
Aldous Huxley