Authoritarian Quotes

Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear, a sense of the imminence of takeover by aliens and real diseases are useful material. (Susan Sontag)
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. View quote
Lionel Trilling
Censorship reflects a society's lack of confidence in itself. It is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime. View quote
Potter Stewart
There is also poetry written to be shouted in a square in front of an enthusiastic crowd. This occurs especially in countries where authoritarian regimes are in power. View quote
Eugenio Montale
Asia's governments come in two broad varieties: young, fragile democracies - and older, fragile authoritarian regimes. View quote
Paul Samuelson
Even the striving for equality by means of a directed economy can result only in an officially enforced inequality - an authoritarian determination of the status of each individual in the new hierarchical order. View quote
Friedrich Hayek
The hope in the hearts of millions of national socialists can be fulfilled only by an authoritarian government. View quote
Franz von Papen
I'm going to put people in my place, so when the history of this administration is written at least there's an authoritarian voice saying exactly what happened. View quote
George W. Bush
A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. Authoritarian institutions and marketers have always known this fact. View quote
Daniel Kahneman
My position and the state will never allow me to become a dictator, but an authoritarian style of rule is characteristic of me, and I have always admitted it. You need to control the country, and the main thing is not to ruin people's lives. View quote
Alexander Lukashenko
The market is sovereign and in the magic economy of the small entrepreneur there is no authoritarian center... in the political sphere... the equilibrium of powers prevails, and hence there is no chance of despotism. (C. Wright Mills)
The individual act of obedience is the cornerstone not only of the strength of authoritarian society but also of its weakness. View quote
Robert Anton Wilson
I don't believe in democracy. In the second place, neither did our white forefathers. I believe, as they did, in a republican authoritarian republic with a limited electorate - just like the one the writers of our Constitution meant this country to be. When these white Christian patriots sat down to write the Declaration of Independence, there were no black citizens for them to worry about. View quote
George Lincoln Rockwell
I have always had severe problems with Austrians. ... Musical, churchy, uptight... nice legs... hypocritical... authoritarian... always insist their dustbins are very clean. View quote
Peter Greenaway
The question, then, for Western companies, as much as for Western governments, is to decide whose side they are on: the Chinese officials who like to define their culture in a paternalistic, authoritarian way, or the large number of Chinese who have their own ideas about freedom. View quote
Ian Buruma
The fundamentalist position on biblical interpretation, with its emphasis on the explicit, complete, final, and authoritarian nature of Scripture, is a very late, minority view quite out of step with the Western tradition. View quote
Carroll Quigley
Disappointment over nationalistic authoritarian regimes may have contributed to the fact that today religion offers a new and subjectively more convincing language for old political orientations. View quote
Jürgen Habermas
The elimination of individual capitalists and the replacement of private capitalism by state capitalism in Russia has not in the least altered the typical helpless and authoritarian character structure of the masses of people. View quote
Wilhelm Reich
Psychic disturbances are the consequences of the sexual chaos of society. For thousands of years, this chaos has had the function of psychically subjecting man to the prevailing conditions of existence, of internalizing the external mechanization of life. It has served to bring about the psychic anchoring of a mechanized and authoritarian civilization by making man incapable of functioning independently. View quote
Wilhelm Reich
The character structure of modern man, who reproduces a six-thousand-year-old patriarchal authoritarian culture is typified by characterological armoring against his inner nature and against the social misery which surrounds him. This characterolgical armoring of the character is the basis of isolation, indigence, craving for authority, fear of responsibility, mystic longing, sexual misery, and neurotically impotent rebelliousness. View quote
Wilhelm Reich
That the more authoritarian organizations survive and prevail goes generally unnoticed because people focus on the objectives of organizations, which are many and varied, rather than on their structures, which lend to be similar. (Robert Shea)
This country is becoming increasingly authoritarian. It's based on capital punishment. View quote
Kate Millett
Those who abhors democracy would rarely immigrate to an authoritarian state if they have to. View quote
Joe Chung
Leadership must be likeable, affable, cordial, and above all emotional. The fashion of authoritarian leadership is gone. Football is about life. You can't be angry all day. View quote
Vicente del Bosque
Parents who discipline their child by discussing the consequences of their actions produce children who have better moral development, compared to children whose parents use authoritarian methods and punishment. View quote
Simon Baron-Cohen