Thomas Day Quotes

We are on the path toward becoming the Sparta of the 21st century, armed to the teeth and without the capacity to care for our own people.

In general, literature is a natural adversary of totalitarianism. Tyrannical governments all view literature in the same way: as their enemy. I lived for a long time in a totalitarian state, and I know firsthand that horror.

The mentality of the Russian demands a lord, a czar, a president.

For much of the twentieth century, 1984 was a year that belonged to the future - a strange, gray future at that. Then it slid painlessly into the past, like any other year. Big Brother arrived and settled in, though not at all in the way George Orwell had imagined.

Any appeasement of tyranny is treason to this republic and to the democratic ideal.

Where some people are very wealthy and others have nothing, the result will be either extreme democracy or absolute oligarchy, or despotism will come from either of those excesses.

There is no real public opinion in Communist countries. They are ruled by an oligarchy.

I believe in benevolent dictatorships, provided I am the dictator.

I have a premonition which sounds like utter folly, and yet it will not leave me: the military state will become one vast factory.

I conceived the most profound admiration for ...[Mussolini, who] ... would not deal with the internal enemies of Italy, but pushed their annihilation in every way and by all means.

In domestic as in political tyranny, the case of absolute monsters chiefly illustrates the institution by showing that there is scarcely any horror which may not occur under it if the despot pleases

Even the most repressive regimes seek to maintain the fiction that they have the people’s interest at heart.

A Study In Utopia and Dictatorship

In oligarchies, militarism has leaped forward, while in those nations which have retained democracy militarism has waned.

The boundaries of Sparta are on the points of our spears…. No Spartan woman has ever seen the smoke of the enemy’s camp..

You can choose whatever name you like for the two types of government. I personally call the type of government which can be removed without violence democracy, and the other tyranny.

Certain sections of the upper classes abroad, identifying conservatism with mere material repression, are given to praising Signor Mussolini

… most republics through history have eventually collapsed, degenerated into tyranny, or were overthrown.

The subjection of individuals will increase amongst democratic nations, not only in the same proportion as their equality, but in the same proportion as their ignorance.

I dedicate this book [The German Dictatorship] to the hope that a sober picture of the German dictatorship may help Germany avoid both old and new dangers, primarily the traditional authoritarian concept of the state, but also radical utopianism—both expressions of intolerance and conceit, and moreover, profoundly unpolitical modes of behavior

When the state was going to tell you what your future would be, science fiction was irrelevant.

Oligarch is just a nonsense word. What does it mean? I don't like it.

What makes 'The Handmaid's Tale' so terrifying is that everything that happens in it is plausible.

There has never been a communism that worked. They were all dictatorships or oligarchies, every single one.

The combination of economic and political power in the same hands is a sure recipe for tyranny.