"If in a country there are the following ten evils: rites, music, odes, history, virtue, moral culture, filial piety, brotherly duty, integrity, and sophistry, the ruler cannot make the people fight and dismemberment is inevitable; and this brings extinction in train. If a country has not these ten things and a ruler can make the people fight, he will be so prosperous he can attain supremacy."
— Lord Shang Yang, The Book of Lord Shang
"Hitler hated painters who were better than him, which is to say, virtually everybody."
"Every week, each television network would secretly produce a list of names of actors, writers, and directors who could not be hired. The list was arbitrary, to say the last. There was, however, a means of expiation for those excluded. A grocery-store owner in Schenectady had made himself the acknowledged authority on Communism by refusing to sell anything advertised on those programs that hired Communists. Simply, a threat from him could deprive you of work; however, if the proscribed actors or writer proved to be genuinely repentant, he could go to Schenectady, much as a sick Catholic might go to Lourdes, and there the Butcher, as we called him, would absolve him if he swore to sin no more."
—Gore Vidal, Palimpsest
Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas?
— Attributed to Joseph Stalin
“They passed a law. Oh, it started very small. In 1950 and ‘60 it was a grain of sand. They began by controlling books of cartoons and then detective books and, of course, films, one way or another, one group or another, political bias, religions prejudice, union pressures; there was always a minority afraid of something, and a great majority afraid of the dark, afraid of the future, afraid of the past, afraid of the present, afraid of themselves and shadows of themselves. Afraid of the word ‘politics’ (which eventually became a synonym for Communism among the more reactionary elements, so I hear, and it was worth your life to use the word!), and with a screw tightened here, a bolt fastened there, a push, a pull, a yank, art and literature were soon like a great twine of taffy strung about, being twisted in braids and tied in knots and thrown in all directions, until there was no more resiliency and no more savor to it. Then the film cameras chopped short and the theaters turned dark, and the print presses trickled down from a great Niagara of reading matter to a mere innocuous dripping of ‘pure’ material.”
— William Stendahl, Usher II by Ray Bradbury
