Bourgeois existence is the regime of private affairs ... and the family is the rotten, dismal edifice in whose closets and crannie...s the most ignominious instincts are deposited. Mundane life proclaims the total subjugation of eroticism to privacy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In early times, before the floods swept across the world, there was life, albeit odd, as one can see from the fossils of mammoth b...ones, and there was the regime of Prince Metternich.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is a totalitarian regime inside every one of us. We are ruled by a ruthless politburo which sets ours norms and drives us fr...om one five-year plan to another. The autonomous individual who has to justify his existence by his own efforts is in eternal bondage to himself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The basic test of freedom is perhaps less in what we are free to do than in what we are free not to do. It is the freedom to refra...in, withdraw and abstain which makes a totalitarian regime impossible.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In comparison to the French Revolution, the American Revolution has come to seem a parochial and rather dull event. This, despite ...the fact that the American Revolution was successful--realizing the purposes of the revolutionaries and establishing a durable political regime--while the French Revolution was a resounding failure, devouring its own children and leading to an imperial despotism, followed by an eventual restoration of the monarchy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The master propagandist, like the advertising expert, avoids obvious emotional appeals and strives for a tone that is consistent w...ith the prosaic quality of modern life--a dry, bland matter-of-factness. Nor does the propagandist circulate "intentionally biased" information. He knows that partial truths serve as more effective instruments of deception than lies. Then he tries to impress the public with statistics of economic growth that ne glect to give the base year from which the growth is calculated, with accurate but meaningless facts about the standard of living--with raw and uninterpreted data, in other words, from which the audience is invited to draw the inescapable conclusion that things are getting better and the present regime therefore deserves the people's confidence.... By using accurate details to imply a misleading picture of the whole, the artful propagandist, it has been said, makes truth the principal form of falsehood.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrinatio...n. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself--educating your own judgements. Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I always draw a parallel between oppression by the regime and oppression by men. To me it is just the same. I always challenge men... on why they react to oppression by the regime, but then they do exactly the same things to women that they criticize the regime for.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If in the opinion of the Tsars authors were to be the servants of the state, in the opinion of the radical critics writers were to... be the servants of the masses. The two lines of thought were bound to meet and join forces when at last, in our times, a new kind of regime the synthesis of a Hegelian triad, combined the idea of the masses with the idea of the state.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »