Koenraad Elst Quotes

All history, and most especially the history of the 20th century, argues against placing ideas in the saddle and allowing them to ride mankind. Too often, they end up riding individual men and women into mass graves.

The ultimate end of any ideology is totalitarianism.

All through human history, tyrannies have tried to enforce obedience by prohibiting disrespect for the symbols of their power. The swastika is only one example of many in recent history.

The menace is ideology, the dogma of politics. It is a prison that makes the American experiment impossible.

No truly sophisticated proponent of repression would be stupid enough to shatter the facade of democratic institutions.

Modern tyrants are terror managers. Do not allow your shock to be turned against your freedom.

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

Under the rule of a repressive whole, liberty can be made into a powerful instrument of domination.

I just became what I call an 'anti-fascist novelist.' There is no word that covers both the fascists and the Communists, which mean different things to people, but of course they're the same: they're tyranny states.

Tyranny is always better organized than freedom.

Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda.

Red is a benevolent dictatorship.

Pervading nationalism imposes its dominion on man today in many different forms and with an aggressiveness that spares no one. The challenge that is already with us is the temptation to accept as true freedom what in reality is only a new form of slavery.

Dictators free themselves, but they enslave the people.

If you listen carefully to Rick Santorum, he sounds more like Stalin than Pope Innocent III.

Baathism in Iraq equals Nazism in Germany.

Concentrated power has always been the enemy of liberty.

Perfection spawns doctrines, dictators and totalitarian ideas.

Dictators are as scared of books as they are of cannon.

... a step in the direction of tyranny.

The poisoning of the civil discourse always accompanies totalitarian movements.

To live under a tyranny is to live without high thought, a life worse than the animals, for what is tyranny but a government framed with the express object of making men so base and vile that they do not know whether they are awake or asleep in the world?

Every dictator uses religion as a prop to keep himself in power.

I am inclined to believe dictators. Not to is dangerous.

President Maliki: The appetite has grown with the eating. He has become a real dictator.