“The authorities in Soviet Russia seem as timorous about subversive propaganda as Conservative old ladies in England. Russia is still a fastness of orthodoxy, even if the guardianship of orthodoxy has changed hands.”

—  H. G. Wells

“Stalin-Wells Talk: The Verbatim Report and A Discussion”, G.B. Shaw, J.M. Keynes et al., London, The New Statesman and Nation, (1934) p. 19

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "The authorities in Soviet Russia seem as timorous about subversive propaganda as Conservative old ladies in England. Ru…" by H. G. Wells?
H. G. Wells photo
H. G. Wells 142
English writer 1866–1946

Related quotes

Malcolm Muggeridge photo
George Orwell photo

“Wherever there is an enforced orthodoxy — or even two orthodoxies, as often happens — good writing stops.”

"The Prevention of Literature" (1946)
Source: 1984
Context: Totalitarianism, however, does not so much promise an age of faith as an age of schizophrenia. A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud. Such a society, no matter how long it persists, can never afford to become either tolerant or intellectually stable. It can never permit either the truthful recording of facts or the emotional sincerity that literary creation demands. But to be corrupted by totalitarianism one does not have to live in a totalitarian country. The mere prevalence of certain ideas can spread a kind of poison that makes one subject after another impossible for literary purposes. Wherever there is an enforced orthodoxy — or even two orthodoxies, as often happens — good writing stops. This was well illustrated by the Spanish civil war. To many English intellectuals the war was a deeply moving experience, but not an experience about which they could write sincerely. There were only two things that you were allowed to say, and both of them were palpable lies: as a result, the war produced acres of print but almost nothing worth reading.

Wilhelm Reich photo

“In the strictly Marxist sense, there is not even in Soviet Russia a state socialism but a state capitalism.”

Preface to the Third Edition (August 1942)
The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933)
Context: In the strictly Marxist sense, there is not even in Soviet Russia a state socialism but a state capitalism. According to Marx, the social condition "capitalism" does not consist in the existence of individual capitalists, but in the existence of the specific "capitalist mode of production", that is, in the production of exchange values instead of use values, in wage work of the masses and in the production of surplus value, which is appropriated by the state or the private owners, and not by the society of working people. In this strictly Marxist sense, the capitalistic system continues to exist in Russia. And it will continue to exist as long as the masses of people continue to lack responsibility and to crave authority.

Edward Schillebeeckx photo
Nikolai Berdyaev photo

“The uniting of Orthodoxy with state absolutism came about on the soil of a non-belief in the Divineness of the earth, in the earthly future of mankind; Orthodoxy gave away the earth into the hands of the state because of its own non-belief in man and mankind, because of its nihilistic attitude towards the world.”

Nikolai Berdyaev (1874–1948) Russian philosopher

"Nihilism  On  A  Religious Soil" (6 May 1907) http://www.berdyaev.com/berdiaev/berd_lib/1907_135_4.html
Context: The uniting of Orthodoxy with state absolutism came about on the soil of a non-belief in the Divineness of the earth, in the earthly future of mankind; Orthodoxy gave away the earth into the hands of the state because of its own non-belief in man and mankind, because of its nihilistic attitude towards the world. Orthodoxy does not believe in the religious ordering of human life upon the earth, and it compensates for its own hopeless pessimism by a call for the forceful ordering of it by state authority.

Józef Piłsudski photo

“Poland can have nothing to do with the restoration of the old Russia. Anything rather than that – even Bolshevism.”

Józef Piłsudski (1867–1935) Polish politician and Prime Minister

Joseph Pilsduski. Interview by Dymitr Merejkowsky, 1921. Translated from the Russian by Harriet E. Kennedy, B.A., London & Edinburgh, Sampson Low, Marston & Co., Ltd., 1921. Quoted from this site http://members.lycos.co.uk/jozefpilsudski/dm.html.
Attributed

Hannah Arendt photo
Patrick Buchanan photo
Jawaharlal Nehru photo
Martyn Percy photo

“To turn the Communion into a cheap replica of Orthodoxy – were such a feat even possible – would be to sell the very soul of Anglicanism.”

Martyn Percy (1962) British Anglican priest and theologian

Source: Sex, Sense and Non-Sense for Anglicans http://modernchurch.org.uk/downloads/finish/818-articles/756-sex-sense-and-non-sense-for-anglicans (2015), p. 11
Context: To turn the Communion into a cheap replica of Orthodoxy – were such a feat even possible – would be to sell the very soul of Anglicanism. We need wisdom from the Archbishop that will help Anglicans find new unity; not more space to express greater individualisms.

Related topics