“The essential principle of totalitarianism is to make laws that are impossible to obey.”

— Christopher Hitchens

Source: god is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

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 essential principle of totalitarianism is to make laws that are impossible to obey." by Christopher Hitchens?

Christopher Hitchens 305

British American author and journalist 1949–2011

Related quotes

“To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.”

Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902) Suffragist and Women's Rights activist

Address to the Tenth National Women's Rights Convention on Marriage and Divorce, New York City, May 11, 1860; as published in Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Feminist as Thinker: A Reader in Documents and Essays edited by Ellen Carol DuBois and Richard Cándida Smith.

“Nobody has a more sacred obligation to obey the law than those who make the law.”

Jean Anouilh Antigone

Source: Antigone

“As poetry is a species of art, its essential principle must be a specific development of the principle essential to all art; and it will merely remain for us to determine what the specific addition is, which the peculiar conditions of the poet's art make to the principle of art in general.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), The Art-Principle as Represented in Poetry, p.182

“It is almost impossible systematically to constitute a natural moral law. Nature has no principles. She furnishes us with no reason to believe that human life is to be respected. Nature, in her indifference, makes no distinction between good and evil.”

Anatole France (1844–1924) French writer

Il est à peu près impossible de constituer systématiquement une morale naturelle. La nature n'a pas de principes. Elle ne nous fournit aucune raison de croire que la vie humaine est respectable. La nature, indifférente, ne fait nulle distinction du bien et du mal.
La Révolte des Anges [The Revolt of the Angels] (1914), ch. XXVII