Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

One should always be vigilant for traces of totalitarianism in any ideology or movement

Once you get a tyranny, you don't easily get rid of it. Much better to remember about eternal vigilance.

It seems to me that the price of eternal vigilance is liberty.

The revolutionary government is the despotism of liberty

We grow tyrannical fighting tyranny.

… the mortal enemy of liberty

That's how dictators get started.

Given the right conditions, any society can turn against democracy. Indeed, if history is anything to go by, all societies eventually will.

I would be opposed to any kind of totalitarian control.

Given the right conditions any society can turn against democracy.

Napoleon - the people who were becoming Napoleon's generals realized that for him, it was not about spreading freedom and revolution; it was about creating a new empire with Napoleon the dictator or the emperor.

I don't know if I want to live in a country where lone wolf and random terror attacks are impossible 'cause that country would look more like North Korea than America.

North Koreans are tragically oppressed. Despite the risks to my personal safety, I feel a strong obligation to tell the world about the Orwellian nightmare that North Koreans face.

Civilization after civilization, it is the same. The world falls to tyranny with a whisper. The frightened are ever keen to bow to a perceived necessity, in the belief that necessity forces conformity, and conformity a certain stability. In a world shaped into conformity, dissidents stand out, are easily branded and dealt with. There is no multitude of perspectives, no dialogue. The victim assumes the face of the tyrant, self-righteous and intransigent, and wars breed like vermin. And people die.

Liberty is lost through complacency and a subservient mindset. When we accept or even welcome automobile checkpoints, random searches, mandatory identification cards, and paramilitary police in our streets, we have lost a vital part of our American heritage. America was born of protest, revolution, and mistrust of government. Subservient societies neither maintain nor deserve freedom for long.

Ultimately freedom is necessary for a society, because every despotic society - for instance, the Russian society - lives on the basis of a rather implausible dogma - the Marxist dogma of world redemption through Communism.

The nightmare in every democracy, the very nightmare, is if it gets worse and worse and worse, we could end up totalitarian.

The trade-off between freedom and security, so often proposed so seductively, very often leads to the loss of both.

Whenever justice is uncertain and police spying and terror are at work, human beings fall into isolation, which, of course, is the aim and purpose of the dictator state, since it is based on the greatest possible accumulation of depotentiated social units.

Revolution is engendered by an indignation with tyranny, yet is itself pregnant with tyranny.... An attempt to scrutinize men's thoughts and punish their opinions is of all kinds of despotism the most odious: yet this is peculiarly character of a period of revolution.... There is no period more at war with the existence of liberty.

A democratic despotism is like a theocracy: it assumes its own correctness.

Despotism accomplishes great things illegally; liberty doesn't even go to the trouble of accomplishing small things legally.

Despots and democratic majorities are drunk with power.

Honor is unknown in despotic states.

Flee the country where a lone man holds all power: It is a nation of slaves.