I was interested by the idea that artists working in a totalitarian dictatorship or tsarist autocracy are secretly and slightly shamefully envied by artists who work in freedom. They have the gratification of intense interest: the authorities want to...
I defend Salman Rushdie because it a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved. In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying, and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humor, the in...
Unless we put medical freedom into the Constitution the time will come when medicine will organize itself into an undercover dictatorship. To restrict the art of healing to doctors and deny equal privileges to others will constitute the Bastille of m...
Jane Hawking: So, I take it you've never been to church? Stephen Hawking: Once upon a time. Jane Hawking: Tempted to convert? Stephen Hawking: I have a slight problem with the celestial dictatorship premise.
But when you have bad governance, of course, these resources are destroyed: The forests are deforested, there is illegal logging, there is soil erosion. I got pulled deeper and deeper and saw how these issues become linked to governance, to corruptio...
I have always dislike people who live by the motto "It's my way or the highway" We live in a free nation called America and not some freaking dictatorship!
If you're eight and you live in Los Angeles and everybody has toys and you go to a country that has a Marxist dictatorship and there are no toy stores and nobody speaks English and it's blazing hot every day and they only have fish, which you don't l...
If you are in Brazil and you grew up in a right-wing dictatorship, you think Marxism is liberating. But if you grew up in Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet Union is controlling everything and killing people, then you think capitalism is liberating. Neit...
I'm not a prophet, but I always thought it was natural for dictatorships to fall. I remember in 1989, two months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, had you said it was going to happen no one would have believed you. The system seemed powerful and un...
A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury. After that, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits with...
My husband is not American. He was born in Brazil, where he grew up under a filthy, corrupt dictatorship. In his twenties, he moved to Europe, where he lived for a while under various socialist democracies. He spent a few years on a kibbutz in Israel...
Look, I don't think President Obama would have bowed to the ruler of Saudi Arabia if he didn't have oil to the degree that the Saudis do. I think they and other producing states, almost all of whom, except Norway and Canada, are dictatorships or auto...
The marks humans leave are too often scars. You build a hideous minimall or start a coup or try to become a rockstar and you think, "They'll remember me now," but (a) they don't remember you, and (b) all you leave behind are more scars. Your coup bec...
A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the people discover they can vote themselves largess out of the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the canidate promising the most be...
Literate, affluent, self-confident people do not like living under either dictatorship or chaos. As more nations move into modernity and find themselves populated with educated, competent citizens, leaders will find it harder to govern those citizens...
There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people w...
My DNA is not negotiable.. I will not sacrifice my dignity nor the dignity of my nation and succumb to such psychopathic dictatorship!!.. The blood in my veins spans back 7000 years.. You cannot alter my genetic makeup nor my genetic beliefs.. I am A...
The champions of socialism call themselves progressives, but they recommend a system which is characterized by rigid observance of routine and by a resistance to every kind of improvement. They call themselves liberals, but they are intent upon aboli...
Whether the mask is labeled fascism, democracy, or dictatorship of the proletariat, our great adversary remains the apparatus—the bureaucracy, the police, the military. Not the one facing us across the frontier of the battle lines, which is not so ...
Joyce Cooper: Fascist! Nicholas Angel: I beg your pardon? Joyce Cooper: [doing a crossword puzzle] System of government categorized by extreme dictatorship. Seven across. Nicholas Angel: Actually that's fascism. Joyce Cooper: Fascism! Wonderful. Nich...
The capitalist empires, with their affirmations of sacrifice for the free world, of defence of private enterprise, of safeguarding order from subversion and chaos, are in fact defending their political prestige and the economic interests arising from...
