Dad is the Head of a Worldwide Organisation that Wants to Dominate the World. Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me 1999 starring Mike Myers & Heather Graham & Michael York & Robert Wagner & Rob Lowe & Mindy Sterling & Seth Green & Verne Troyer & Elizabeth Hurley & Will Ferrell et al, director Jay Roach
World domination – same old dream. Dr No 1962 starring Sean Connery & Ursula Andress & Jack Lord & Joseph Wiseman & Bernard Lee & Anthony Dawson & John Kitzmiller & Zena Marshall & Eunice Gayson & Louis Maxwell & Peter Burtonn et al, director Terence Young, James
You’re one of the ardent believers – a good American. Oh, there are millions like you. People who play along, without asking questions. I hate to use the word stupid, but it seems to be the only one that applies. The great masses, the moron millions. Well, there are a few of us unwilling to troop along ... a few of us who are clever enough to see that there’s much more to be done than just live small complacent lives, a few of us in America who desire a more profitable type of government. When you think about it, Mr Kane, the competence of totalitarian nations is much higher than ours. They get things done. Saboteur 1942 starring Robert Cummings & Priscilla Lane & Otto Kruger & Alan Baxter & Clem Bevans & Norman Lloyd & Alma Kruger & Vaughan Glaser & Ian Wolfe & Dorothy Peterson & Selmer Jackson et al, director Alfred Hitchcock, Charles
A matter of internal security: the age-old cry of the oppressor. Star Trek: The Next Generation s3e11: The Hunted, Picard
The Carnegie Endowment Fund for Peace plotted to get the United States into World War One and to prolong it, and they said if you can get the American people into war and be afraid of their survival, they will accept a totalitarian government. G Edward Griffin, interview Alex Jones November 2009
The government could seize property and use it for the war. The right to strike was abolished. New taxes were introduced to prevent war profiteers. The democracy had paradoxically assumed the garb of the totalitarian dictatorship it sought to destroy. World War II: The Complete History: A Kind of Victory, Discovery 2000
The United States has, in spite of the Constitution and its supposed constraints, become a quasi-totalitarian state. Antony C Sutton, author Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler
Our government will soon become what it is already a long way toward becoming, an elective dictatorship. J William Fulbright
Four sorrows ... are certain to be visited on the United States. Their cumulative effect guarantees that the US will cease to resemble the country outlined in the Constitution of 1787. First, there will be a state of perpetual war, leading to more terrorism against Americans wherever they may be and a spreading reliance on nuclear weapons among smaller nations as they try to ward off the imperial juggernaut. Second is a loss of democracy and Constitutional rights as the presidency eclipses Congress and is itself transformed from a co-equal ‘executive branch’ of government into a military junta. Third is the replacement of truth by propaganda, disinformation, and the glorification of war, power, and the military legions. Lastly, there is bankruptcy, as the United States pours its economic resources into ever more grandiose military projects and shortchanges the education, health, and safety of its citizens. Chalmers Johnson
The essence of oligarchical rule is not father-to-son inheritance, but the persistence of a certain world-view and a certain way of life ... A ruling group is a ruling group so long as it can nominate its successors ... Who wields power is not important, provided that the hierarchical structure remains always the same. George Orwell, 1984
Always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – for ever. ibid.
A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude. To make them love it is the task assigned, in present-day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors and schoolteachers ... The greatest triumphs of propaganda have been accomplished, not by doing something, but by refraining from doing. Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World foreword 1946 edition
Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. Frederick Douglass
Despotic government supports itself by abject civilization, in which debasement of the human mind, and wretchedness in the mass of the people, are the chief criterions. Such governments consider man merely as an animal; that the exercise of intellectual faculty is not his privilege; that he has nothing to do with the laws but to obey them; and they politically depend more upon breaking the spirit of the people by poverty, than they fear enraging it by desperation. Thomas Paine, First Principles of Government 1795
In the eighteenth century most people in the world from France to India, from Russia to China, lived in the long shadow of an absolute ruler. Andrew Marr’s History of the World VI: Revolution, BBC 2012
What want these outlaws conquerors should have
But History’s purchased page to call them great? Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage III:48
What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy. Mahatma Gandhi
There is danger that totalitarian governments, not subject to vigorous popular debate, will underestimate the will and unity of democratic societies where vital interests are concerned. John F Kennedy, news conference June 1961
To succeed in chaining the multitude, you must seem to wear the same fetters. Voltaire
The horror of Communism, Stalinism, is not that bad people do bad things – they always do. It’s that good people do horrible things thinking they are doing something great. Slavoj Zizek, November 2011
Totalitarianism is not only hell, but all the dream of paradise – the age-old dream of a world where everybody would live in harmony, united by a single common will and faith, without secrets from one another. Andre Breton, too, dreamed of this paradise when he talked about the glass house in which he longed to live. If totalitarianism did not exploit these archetypes, which are deep inside us all and rooted deep in all religions, it could never attract so many people, especially during the early phases of its existence. Once the dream of paradise starts to turn into reality, however, here and there people begin to crop up who stand in its way, and so the rulers of paradise must build a little gulag on the side of Eden. In the course of time this gulag grows ever bigger and more perfect, while the adjoining paradise gets even smaller and poorer. Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Ultimately, totalitarianism is the only sort of politics that can truly serve the sky-god’s purpose. Any movement of a liberal nature endangers his authority and that of his delegates on earth. One God, one King, one Pope, one master in the factory, one father-leader in the family at home. Gore Vidal
Totalitarianism ... does not so much promise an age of faith as an age of schizophrenia. A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud. Such a society, no matter how long it persists, can never afford to become either tolerant or intellectually stable. It can never permit either the truthful recording of facts or the emotional sincerity that literary creation demands. But to be corrupted by totalitarianism one does not have to live in a totalitarian country. The mere prevalence of certain ideas can spread a kind of poison that makes one subject after another impossible for literary purposes. Wherever there is an enforced orthodoxy – or even two orthodoxies, as often happens – good writing stops. This was well illustrated by the Spanish civil war. To many English intellectuals the war was a deeply moving experience, but not an experience about which they could write sincerely. There were only two things that you were allowed to say, and both of them were palpable lies: as a result, the war produced acres of print but almost nothing worth reading. George Orwell, The Prevention of Literature 1946
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 Orwell, 1984
The organized lying practised by totalitarian states is not, as is sometimes claimed, a temporary expedient of the same nature as military deception. It is something integral to totalitarianism, something that would still continue even if concentration camps and secret police forces had ceased to be necessary. George Orwell, Books v Cigarettes
From the totalitarian point of view history is something to be created rather than learned. A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy, and its ruling caste, in order to keep its position, has to be thought of as infallible. But since, in practice, no one is infallible, it is frequently necessary to rearrange past events in order to show that this or that mistake was not made, or that this or that imaginary triumph actually happened. Then again, every major change in policy demands a corresponding change of doctrine and a revelation of prominent historical figures. This kind of thing happens everywhere, but is clearly likelier to lead to outright falsification in societies where only one opinion is permissible at any given moment ...