Quotes about suppression (515 quotes, page 2)

“The great commandment of the narratives is that your life must be meaningful,” said Charon. “If knowing the truth strips the meaning away, then the truth must be suppressed.”

Karl Schroeder (1962) Author. Technology consultant

Source: Lady of Mazes (2005), Chapter 16 (p. 179).

Life , Truth

“The relevance of canonicity has nothing to do with the notion of codified establishments of hierarchical judgment (for which it typically attracts revisionist hostility). Instead, canonicity is important as the capacity to permit vibrant reading relationships to works from the past. … Whatever else the canon may do, its primary function has been the preservation of the reception of literature across periodic borders, thereby calling into question the significance of those borders or the fetishism of contexts. The canon tunnels under the Berlin Wall that periodizers erect between literary regimes. As a fundamental level, therefore, periodization stands at odds with canonicity. Canonicity maintains, cultivates, and develops community over time and across generations; periodization breaks up that identity and suppresses the historical continuities through a strategy of temporal separation.”

Russell Berman (1950) American academic

Source: Fiction Sets You Free: Literature, Liberty and Western Culture (2007), p. 19.

Hostility , Communication , Literature , Question

“Yours of July 27 is received. It confirms the accounts we receive from others that the infractions of the embargo in Maine and Massachusetts are open. I have removed Pope, of New Bedford, for worse than negligence. The collector of Sullivan is on the totter. The Tories of Boston openly threaten insurrection if their importation of flour is stopped. The next post will stop it. I fear your Governor [Sullivan] is not up to the tone of these parricides, and I hope on the first symptom of an open opposition of the law by force you will fly to the scene, and aid in suppressing any commotion.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Letter to General Henry Dearborn, Secretary of War (August 9, 1808) in regards to enforcing the American embargo.
1800s, Second Presidential Administration (1805-1809)

Fear , Law , Hope , Flying

“Your honoured letter regarding suppression of the Jats has arrived. Allah is merciful, and it is hoped that he will crush the enemy. You should rest assured… You should forge unity with Musa Khan and other Muslim groups, and put to use this friendship and unity for facing the enemies. I hope for sure that on account of this unity among Muslims and their nobility, victory will be achieved.
The reason for the rise of enemies and the fall of Muslims is nothing except that, led by their lower nature, Muslims have shared their (Muslims’) concerns with Hindus. It is obvious that Hindus will not tolerate the suppression of non-Muslims. Being farsighted and practising patience are praiseworthy things, but not to the extent that non-Muslims take possession of Muslim cities, and go on occupying one (such) city every day… This is no time for farsightedness and patience. This is the time for putting trust in Allah, for manifesting the might of the sword, and for arousing the Muslim sense of honour. If you will do that, it is possible that winds of favour will start blowing. Whatever this recluse knows is this that war with the Jats is a magic spell which appears fearful at first but which, if you depend fully on the power of Allah and draw His attention towards this (war), will turn out to be no more than a mere show. Let me hope that you will keep me informed of developments and the faring of your arms…”

Shah Waliullah Dehlawi (1703–1762) Indian muslim scholar

To Taj Muhammad Khan Baluch Translated from the Urdu version of K.A. Nizami, Shãh Walîullah Dehlvî ke Siyãsî Maktûbãt, Second Edition, Delhi, 1969, pp. 150-51.
From his letters

Friendship , War , Fear , Hope

“The pope has been up against an intransigent church bureaucracy. Vatican officials have proved unwilling to cooperate with the commission; nor has it been furnished with enough resources. But above all, there has been cultural resistance within the church over abuse. The clerical caste is one shaped by obedience and a deep fear of sullying the reputation of the church. The relationship of bishop and priest is a paternal one; if the priest errs, the bishop may focus on forgiveness of the miscreant rather than punishment of an abuser, while his greatest focus is on avoiding publicity. But the church is now reaping what it sowed: like long-festering sores, the suppressed scandals are erupting everywhere.”

Catherine Pepinster (1959)

Pope Francis has utterly failed to tackle the church’s abuse scandal https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jul/26/pope-francis-catholic-church-abuse-scandal-failed (26 July 2018), The Guardian.

Fear , Forgiveness

“Pernkopf was only one of many Austrians who were "rehabilitated" in the postwar period. Their rehabilitation underscores the tendency of Austria to forget, suppress, and deny the events of the Nazi period. …Anton Pelinka …has called this phenomenon the "great Austrian taboo." It is precisely this moral vacuum that induced Simon Wiesenthal to establish his documentation center for Nazi war crimes in Austria, not Germany.”

Eric R. Kandel (1929) American neuropsychiatrist

In Search of Memory (2006)

War , Forgetting

“The new architecture has suppressed monotonous repetition and destroyed the equality of two symmetrical halves. It does not allow for continuous repetition. A block of houses is as much a whole as an independent house. Balance and symmetry are two entirely different things. In place of symmetry the new architecture proposes a balanced relationship of unequal parts or parts which differ [in position, proportion, size and materials] in functional character.”

Theo van Doesburg (1883–1931) Dutch architect, painter, draughtsman and writer

Quote from his unpublished writing, 'Fundamental principles', 1930; as cited in Theo van Doesburg, Joost Baljeu, Studio Vista, London 1974, p. 203
1926 – 1931

Parting , Housing

“Do you think that a reporter has a right to supply or suppress any part of a judgment?”

Henry Brougham, 1st Baron Brougham and Vaux (1778–1868) English barrister, politician, and Lord Chancellor of Great Britain

Cadell v. Palmer (1833), 1 Cl. & F. 372.

Thinking , Parting

“You’re obliged to pretend respect for people and institutions you think absurd. You live attached in a cowardly fashion to moral and social conventions you despise, condemn and know lack all foundation. It is that permanent contradiction between your ideas and desires and all the dead formalities and vain pretenses of your civilization which makes you sad, troubled and unbalanced. In that intolerable conflict you lose all joy of life and all feeling of personality, because at every moment they suppress and restrain and check the free play of your powers. That’s the poisoned and mortal wound of the civilized world.”

Octave Mirbeau (1848–1917) French journalist, art critic, travel writer, pamphleteer, novelist, and playwright

Garden of Tortures

Life , People , World , Sadness

“We can actually change the expression of genes—tumor suppressing genes, tumor activating genes—by what we eat, what we put into our bodies. So, even if you've been dealt a bad genetic deck, you can still reshuffle it with diet. … When you’re treating diseases with drugs, you know there’s one drug you take for cholesterol, a different class of drugs you take for high blood pressure, different class of drugs you take for diabetes, but, with diet, a plant-based diet affects all these diseases. One diet to kinda rule them all.”

Michael Greger (1972) American physician, author, and vegan health activist

Interview in the documentary-film What the Health by Kip Andersen (2017).

Disease , Change

“Fear of serious injury cannot alone justify suppression of free speech and assembly. Men feared witches and burnt women. It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears.”

Louis Brandeis (1856–1941) American Supreme Court Justice

Concurring, Whitney v. California, 274 U.S. 357, 376 (1927).
Judicial opinions

Women , Men , Fear

“Oneiric values have definitely won out over the others, and I maintain that anyone who still refuses to see, for instance, a horse galloping on a tomato, must be an idiot. A tomato is also a child's balloon - Surrealism, again, having suppressed the word "like."”

André Breton (1896–1966) French writer

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=baKRHNX7eo0C&pg=PA43#v=onepage&q&f=false
from: Point du Jour (Break of Day; 1934)
Breton's quote is often misquoted as The man who can't visualize a horse galloping on a tomato is an idiot.
after 1930

Horse

“We must pursue the removal of church property by any means necessary in order to secure for ourselves a fund of several hundred million gold rubles (do not forget the immense wealth of some monasteries and lauras). Without this fund any government work in general, any economic build-up in particular, and any upholding of soviet principles in Genoa especially is completely unthinkable. In order to get our hands on this fund of several hundred million gold rubles (and perhaps even several hundred billion), we must do whatever is necessary. But to do this successfully is possible only now. All considerations indicate that later on we will fail to do this, for no other time, besides that of desperate famine, will give us such a mood among the general mass of peasants that would ensure us the sympathy of this group, or, at least, would ensure us the neutralization of this group in the sense that victory in the struggle for the removal of church property unquestionably and completely will be on our side.
One clever writer on statecraft correctly said that if it is necessary for the realization of a well-known political goal to perform a series of brutal actions then it is necessary to do them in the most energetic manner and in the shortest time, because masses of people will not tolerate the protracted use of brutality. … Now victory over the reactionary clergy is assured us completely. In addition, it will be more difficult for the major part of our foreign adversaries among the Russian emigres abroad, i. e., the Socialist-Revolutionaries and the Milyukovites, to fight against us if we, precisely at this time, precisely in connection with the famine, suppress the reactionary clergy with utmost haste and ruthlessness.
Therefore, I come to the indisputable conclusion that we must precisely now smash the Black Hundreds clergy most decisively and ruthlessly and put down all resistance with such brutality that they will not forget it for several decades. … The greater the number of representatives of the reactionary clergy and the reactionary bourgeoisie that we succeed in shooting on this occasion, the better because this "audience" must precisely now be taught a lesson in such a way that they will not dare to think about any resistance whatsoever for several decades.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

Letter to Comrade Molotov for the Politburo (19 March 1922) http://www.ibiblio.org/expo/soviet.exhibit/ae2bkhun.html
Variant translation:
It is precisely now and only now, when in the starving regions people are eating human flesh, and hundreds if not thousands of corpses are littering the roads, that we can (and therefore must) carry out the confiscation of church valuables. … I come to the categorical conclusion that precisely at this moment we must give battle to the Black Hundred clergy in the most decisive and merciless manner and crush its resistance with such brutality that it will not forget it for decades to come. The greater the number of representatives of the reactionary clergy and reactionary bourgeoisie we succeed in executing for this reason, the better.
As translated in The Unknown Lenin : From the Secret Archive (1996) edited by Richard Pipes, pp. 152-4
1920s

People , Way , Mood , Thinking

“Walking is the natural recreation for a man who desires not absolutely to suppress his intellect but to turn it out to play for a season.”

Leslie Stephen Studies of a Biographer

Studies of a Biographer: Second Series (London: Duckworth, 1902) vol. 3, p. 261

Nature , Season

“Terror is trump. Methods of common brutal suppression are considered sanctified laws. "Old Fighters" are saints, and from the district leader upwards there are only Gods!”

Friedrich Kellner (1885–1970) German Justice inspector

October 7, 1939; Vol. 1, p. 30.
Diary (1939 - 1945)

God , Law

“In the history of bourgeois society, legislative reform served to strengthen progressively the rising class till the latter was sufficiently strong to seize political power, to suppress the existing juridical system and to construct itself a new one.”

Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919) Polish Marxist theorist, socialist philosopher, and revolutionary

Source: Reform or Revolution (1899), Ch.8

History , Strong

“Why are ecologists and environmentalists so feared and hated? This is because in part what they have to say is new to the general public, and the new is always alarming. Moreover, the practical recommendations deduced from ecological principles threaten the vested interests of commerce; it is hardly surprising that the financial and political power created by these investments should be used sometimes to suppress environmental impact studies. However, I think the major opposition to ecology has deeper roots than mere economics; ecology threatens widely held values so fundamental that they must be called religious. An attack on values is inevitably seen as an act of subversion.”

Garrett Hardin (1915–2003) American ecologist

Naked Emperors : Essays of a Taboo-Stalker (1982)

Hate , Fear , Thinking , Study

“So everything is done to suppress the success of the Christian community whether it is in the field of education or charity or rehabilitation, whatever sphere. And to exalt the statist approach which is basically a non moral approach, the belief, just as in the public schools that education will save you is, in other spheres a psychological rehabilitation will make the child a good person or that the welfare worker is going not make the welfare recipients into fine law abiding citizens. It simply isn’t so.”

Rousas John Rushdoony (1916–2001) American theologian

Audio lectures, Christian Charity vs Welfarism (September 4, 1996)

Education , School , Law , Communication

“Giant predator lizards can't evolve in the presence of big mammal predators. So the lesson is that mammals suppress much of the evolutionary potential of modern lizards. Is the Komodo dragon a good working model of how dinosaurs succeeded? Absolutely not. Dinosaurs suppressed the evolutionary potential of mammals, not the other way around. And dinosaurs carried out this supression everywhere, on all the continents, not merely on a few tiny tropical isles. Dinosaurs succeeded where Komodo dragons fail.”

Robert T. Bakker book The Dinosaur Heresies

The Dinosaur Heresies: A Revolutionary View of Dinosaurs (1986), Longman Scientific & Technical, p. 81
The Dinosaur Heresies (1986)

Way

“Agreeably to the request of the House of Representatives, communicated in their resolution of the 16th instant, I proceed to state under the reserve therein expressed, information received touching an illegal combination of private individuals against the peace and safety of the Union, and a military expedition planned by them against the territories of a power in amity with the United States, with the measures I have pursued for suppressing the same….
But by information received yesterday I learn that on the 22d of December, Mr. Burr descended the Cumberland with two boats merely of accommodation, carrying with him from that State no quota toward his unlawful enterprise. Whether after the arrival of the proclamation, of the orders, or of our agent, any exertion which could be made by that State, or the orders of the governor of Kentucky for calling out the militia at the mouth of Cumberland, would be in time to arrest these boats, and those from the falls of the Ohio, is still doubtful.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Special Message to Congress on the Burr Conspiracy, declaring his former Vice President an illegal conspirator and a fugitive from justice (22 January 1807)
1800s, Second Presidential Administration (1805-1809)

Peace , Communication , Learning , Time

“Birth control is not contraception indiscriminately and thoughtlessly practiced. It means the release and cultivation of the better racial elements in our society, and the gradual suppression, elimination and eventual extirpation of defective stocks— those human weeds which threaten the blooming of the finest flowers of American civilization.”

Margaret Sanger (1879–1966) American birth control activist, educator and nurse

"Apostle of Birth Control Sees Cause Gaining Here", The New York Times, , p. XII http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9C01E1DF1F30E333A2575BC0A9629C946295D6CF.

Flowers , Birth

“The things that we think we want are often substitutes for what we really want, and the pleasures we seek are less than the joy that they distract us from. From the normal vantage point, it certainly seems that only with discipline can we withstand the temptations that surround us: overeating, drugs, video games, mindless internet surfing, and everything else we consume. These things are undeniably destructive to our own lives and beyond; therefore, it would seem, we cannot always trust desire at all. But when we recognize that these are not really what we desire, our goal becomes not to suppress desire but to identify the true want or need, and to fulfill it. That is no trivial task; it is a profound path of self-realization.”

Charles Eisenstein (1967) American writer

The More Beautiful World our Hearts Know is Possible http://charleseisenstein.net/project/the-more-beautiful-world-our-hearts-know-is-possible/
The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible. The Vision and Practice of Interbeing (2013)

Pleasure , Game , Thinking , Joy

“During all these days Lao Chiu was lying on the bed suffering continual pain. The doctors and nurses did their utmost to reduce his suffering to the minimum, but they could not completely relieve it. Even the chief surgeon said once, "When we were healing him I often thought that if another person was in his place he certainly would not have stood it so long, but Lao DChiu endured everything. When I saw him grinding his teeth to suppress his groans, I felt so touched that the tears feel from my eyes." Indeed he suffered great pain for a long period. While changing the dressings even laughing gas anaesthesia could not keep him quiet. Sometimes these pains were so intense that his whole body trembled uncontrollably.”

Ba Jin (1904–2005) Chinese novelist

A Battle For Life (July 1958)

Pain , Feeling , Lying , Tear

“Let us never imagine that faith can ever be furthered by suppressing doubt, let alone by suppressing evidence. All truth is one, and religion must be as eager as science to know the truth as far as man can perceive it. If something we have treasured as truth is really contradicted by unanswerable evidence, then in the name of the God of truth we must part with it however venerable it may be. Let us never suppose that we can take over faith from our parents without examination, or believe anything merely because another says it is true. But let us not be content with a static agnosticism which never rouses itself to make inquiry. Let us examine the evidence and then in complete loyalty to its trend make a leap both of intellect and will, and, committing ourselves, acting as if all were established, try out in life the faith that carries us on wings after the hard road of fact and reason stops.”

Leslie Weatherhead (1893–1976) English theologian

Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.231

Life , God , Truth , Faith

“Ambitious young women today are taught to ignore or suppress every natural instinct, if it conflicts with the feminist agenda posed on them. All literary and artistic works, no matter how great, that document the ambivalence of female sexuality they are trained to dismiss as “misogynous.” In other words, their minds are being programmed to secede from their bodies … there is a huge gap between feminist rhetoric and women’s actual sex lives, where feminism is of little help except with a certain stratum of deferential, malleable, white middle-class men.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Vamps and Tramps (1994), "No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality", p. 31

Women , Men , Sex , Nature

“In the end it is worse to suppress dissent than to run the risk of heresy.”

Learned Hand (1872–1961) American legal scholar, Court of Appeals judge

Oliver Wendell Holmes lecture delivered at Harvard (1958); quoted in The Rhetoric of Our Times (1969) by J. Jeffery Auer, p. 124.
Extra-judicial writings

“Martin himself had of course a serious intention and must, for all his motley, be regarded as a heroic figure. Nor have I any sympathy with those who make prim mouths at him for introducing scurrility into a theological debate, for debate was precisely what the bishops had suppressed. Those who refuse to let their opponents dispute have no right to complain if they hear instead lewd catcalls in the streets; in a sense, it is what they have chosen.”

Martin Marprelate (1588–1589)

C. S. Lewis English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959) p. 405.
Criticism

Sense

“[W]e need to shove aside the notions of the Progressives and Lost-Causers, that Reconstruction was some sort of Vichy occupation of a poor, pitiable South, as well as of the Marxists, that Reconstruction could have been the beginning of a socialist America had not the monied interests suppressed it. Neither of these approaches has much sense of the texture of Reconstruction’s reality.”

Allen C. Guelzo (1953) American historian

2010s, Interview with Sara Gabbard (2018)

Reality , Sense

“Under Muhammad Tughlaq, wars and rebellions knew no end. Even an enhancement of land-tax ended in massacres in the Doab. Many more perished on the way when the capital was shifted to Daulatabad. His Qarachal expedition cost him a whole army. His expeditions to Bengal, Sind and the Deccan, as well as ruthless suppression of twenty-two rebellions, meant only depopulation.15 From all accounts it is certain that in the thirteenth and first half of the fourteenth century the loss of population was immense.”

Muhammad bin Tughluq (1290–1351) Turkic Sultan of Delhi

Lal, K. S. (1990). Indian Muslims, who are they.

War , Way , Loss

“On the whole we get on pretty smoothly in our domestic relations, except in the lower strata of the Military Classes. There the want of tact and discretion on the part of the husbands produces at times indescribable disasters. Relying too much on the offensive weapons of their acute angles instead of the defensive organs of good sense and seasonable simulation, these reckless creatures too often neglect the prescribed construction of the women's apartments, or irritate their wives by ill-advised expressions out of doors, which they refuse immediately to retract. Moreover a blunt and stolid regard for literal truth indisposes them to make those lavish promises by which the more judicious Circle can in a moment pacify his consort. The result is massacre; not, however, without its advantages, as it eliminates the more brutal and troublesome of the Isosceles; and by many of our Circles the destructiveness of the Thinner Sex is regarded as one among many providential arrangements for suppressing redundant population, and nipping Revolution in the bud.

Yet even in our best regulated and most approximately Circular families I cannot say that the ideal of family life is so high as with you in Spaceland. There is peace, in so far as the absence of slaughter may be called by that name, but there is necessarily little harmony of tastes or pursuits; and the cautious wisdom of the Circles has ensured safety at the cost of domestic comfort.”

Edwin Abbott Abbott book Flatland

Source: Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884), PART I: THIS WORLD, Chapter 4. Concerning the Women

Life , Wisdom , Women , Truth

“Thus, as [Karl] Kautsky wrote in 1919, there was growing up amid despotic conditions a new class of bureaucratic German exploiters, no better than the Tsarist chinovniks; and the workers’ future struggle against tyranny would be even more desperate than under traditional capitalism, when they could exploit divergences of interest between capital and the state bureaucracy, whereas in Bolshevik Russia these two had coalesced into one. This kind of regimented socialism could only maintain itself by denying its own principles, which it was most likely to do, given the Bolsheviks’ notorious opportunism and the ease with which they changed their tune from one day to the next. The most probable result would be a kind of Thermidor reaction which the Russian workers would welcome as a liberation, like the French in 1794. The original sin of Bolshevism lay in the suppression of democracy, abolition of elections, and denial of the freedom of speech and assembly, and in the belief that socialism could be based on a minority despotism imposed by force, which by its own logic was bound to intensify the rule of terror. If the Leninists were able to keep their "Tartar socialism" going long enough, it would infallibly result in the bureaucratization and militarization of society and finally in the autocratic rule of a single individual.”

Leszek Kolakowski (1927–2009) Philosopher, historian of ideas

pg. 51
Main Currents Of Marxism (1978), Three Volume edition, Volume II, The Golden Age

Democracy , Freedom , Change , Future

“For most of her existence, Molly had not shied from a truth that most people understood but diligently suppressed: that every moment of every day, depending on the faith we embrace, each of us continues to live either by the merciful sufferance of God or at the whim of blind chance and indifferent nature.”

Dean Koontz book The Taking

Part 1, Chapter 2
The Taking (2004)

God , People , Truth , Faith

“Spare no effort to suppress selfishness, unless that effort would entail sorrow.”

Thomas Jackson (1824–1863) Confederate general

Misattributed, Jackson's personal book of maxims

Effort , Selfishness

“The more the people are discontented with the oppression of taxes; the greater need the prince has of money to distribute among his partisans and pay the troops that are to suppress all resistance, and enable him to plunder at pleasure. There is scarce a king in a hundred who would not, if he could, follow the example of Pharaoh, get first all the peoples money, then all their lands, and then make them and their children servants for ever...”

Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) American author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, inventor, civic activist, …

Speech to the Constitutional Convention, (June 2, 1787).
Constitutional Convention of 1787

Money , Children , People , Pleasure

“... said the not entirely suppressed old Ivan, rearing his head from inside the new one, although without much confidence.”

Mikhail Bulgakov book The Master and Margarita

Book One in 'Black Magic and Its Expose', B/O
The Master and Margarita (1967)

Confidence

“I have a temper. My mum's got a temper. My brother's got a temper. You've got to have one. You know what happens if you don't have one? One day you're walking down the street and you just pop. You're lying there dead on the pavement because you've been holding and suppressing all this bullshit, you know.”

Russell Crowe (1964) New Zealand-born Australian actor, film producer and musician

60 Minutes interview (2006)

Lying , Dead

“There is no country in Europe which does not have in some corner or other one or several ruined fragments of peoples (Völkerruinen), the remnant of a former population that was suppressed and held in bondage by the nation which later became the main vehicle of historical development. These relics of a nation mercilessly trampled under foot in the course of history, as Hegel says, these residual fragments of peoples (Völkerabfälle) always become fanatical standard-bearers of counter-revolution and remain so until their complete extirpation or loss of their national character, just as their whole existence in general is itself a protest against a great historical revolution.”

Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) German social scientist, author, political theorist, and philosopher

The Magyar Struggle http://www.marxistsfr.org/archive/marx/works/1849/01/13.htm in Neue Rheinische Zeitung (13 January 1849).

People , History , Loss , Country

“A recovery after a depression is as inevitable as that day follows night. It can not be permanently suppressed. Its vitality is so powerful that it will break down the barriers set up by the most arbitrary dictator. Hence there is developing a new confidence and a new faith in those principles which have formed the the foundation of economic evolution and industrial progress during the last several decades — principles which we have been proud to call "American principles," and for which we have been reared with a wholesome respect. There are still lacking the assurances of a broad and definitely defined opportunity and the elimination of certain unsound economic policies, thus limiting the application of these vital principles we have always known and retarding their ability to accelerate our economic recovery.”

Alfred P. Sloan (1875–1966) American businessman

Source: "The Broadened Responsibilities of Industry's Executive," 1936, p. 351; Lead paragraph.

Faith , Confidence , Night

“While in totalitarian regimes, government controls the media and criminalizes journalists, bloggers and human rights defenders who do not echo the State’s propaganda, in numerous democratic countries, the media are largely in private hands — too few hands. Often media are controlled by conglomerates responsive to corporations and advertisers who determine the content of news and other programmes, frequently disseminating disinformation or suppressing crucial information necessary for democratic discourse. Indeed, the media blackout on important issues constitutes a grave obstacle to democracy, since absent sufficient information and without free and pluralistic media, democracy is dysfunctional and the political process, including elections, becomes a mere formality — not an expression of the will of the people.”

Alfred de Zayas (1947) American United Nations official

2013
Source: United Nations General Assembly - Promotion of a democratic and equitable international order http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Issues/IntOrder/A-68-284_en.pdf.

People , Democracy , Country

“The imagination works by a principle of sympathy with the suppressed and subversive elements in experience. It sees the residues, memories, and reports of past or faraway social worlds and neglected or obscure perceptions as the main stuff with which we remake our contexts. It explains the operation of a social order by representing what the remaking of this order would require. It generalizes our ideas by tracing a penumbra of remembered or intimated possibility around present or past settlements, and it then subhjects this enlarged sense of possibility to the tests of further comparison and practice. By all these means it undermines the identification of the actual with the possible.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger (1947) Brazilian philosopher and politician

Source: Social Theoryː Its Situation and Its Task (1987), p. 204

World , Imagination , Idea , Sense

“That means I'll have to use $ans to suppress newlines now.Life is ridiculous.”

Larry Wall (1954) American computer programmer and author, creator of Perl

Source code, <code>Configure</code>

“In the pedagogical as in certain other spheres freedom is not allowed to erupt, the power of the opposition is not allowed to put a word in edgewise: they want submissiveness. Only a formal and material training is being aimed at and only scholars come out of the menageries of the humanists, only "useful citizens" out of those of the realists, both of whom are indeed nothing but subservient people. Our good background of recalcitrancy [sic] gets strongly suppressed and with it the development of knowledge to free will. The result of school is then philistinism.”

Max Stirner book The False Principle of our Education

Source: The False Principle of our Education (1842), p. 23

People , School , Knowledge , Freedom

“Probably the greatest single weakness of the Sino-Soviet bloc is her shaky economy. Here is a soft spot where peaceful pressures could be devastating. No amount of Soviet propaganda can cover up the obvious collapse of the Chinese communes and the sluggish inefficiency of the Soviet collectivized farms. Every single Soviet satellite is languishing in a depression. Even Pravda has openly criticized the lack of bare essentials and the shoddy quality of Russian-made goods. These factors of austerity and deprivation add to the hatred and misery of the people which constantly feed the flames of potential revolt. Terrorist tactics have been used by the Red leaders to suppress uprisings. In spite of the virtual "state of siege" which exists throughout the Soviet empire, there are many outbreaks of violent protest. All of this explains why the Soviet leaders are constantly pleading for "free trade," "long-term loans," "increased availability of material goods from the West." Economically, Communism is collapsing but the West has not had the good sense to exploit it. Instead, the United States, Great Britain and 37 other Western powers are shipping vast quantities of goods to the Sino-Soviet bloc. Some business leaders have had the temerity to suggest that trade with the Reds helps the cause of peace. They suggest that "you never fight the people you trade with." Apparently they cannot even remember as far back as the late Thirties when this exact type of thinking resulted in the sale of scrap iron and oil to the Japanese just before World War II. After the attack on Pearl Harbor it became tragically clear that while trade with friends may promote peace, trade with a threatening enemy is an act of self-destruction. Have we forgotten that fatal lesson so soon?”

W. Cleon Skousen book The Naked Communist

The Naked Communist (1958)

War , People , World , Peace

“How strange it seems that education, in practice, so often means suppression: that instead of leading the mind outward to the light of day it crowds things in upon it that darken and weary it. Yet evidently the true object of education, now as ever, is to develop the capabilities of the head and of the heart.”

Louis Sullivan (1856–1924) American architect

Emotional Architecture as Compared to Intellectual (1894)

Education , Light , Heart

“The virtual suppression of ethical discussion after 1845 produces the semblance of purely descriptive analysis, dressed in the mantle of positivist objectivity, analysis which is, in fact, strung to a framework of crude, because unexplicated, moral assumptions.”

John Carroll (1944) Australian professor and author

Source: Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), p. 80

“The original idea, the sketch, which is so to speak the egg or embryo of the idea, is usually far from being complete; it contains everything, which is simply a mixing together of all parts. Just the thing that makes of this sketch the essential expression of the idea is not the suppression of details, but their complete subordination to the big lines, which are, before all else, to create the impression. The greatest difficulty therefore is that of returning in the picture to that effacing of the details which, however, make up the composition, the web and the woof of the picture.”

Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) French painter

quote in 1854, in Artists on Art – from the 14th – 20th centuries, ed. by Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves; Pantheon Books, 1972, London, pp. 234 – 235
1831 - 1863

Idea , Parting

“I care nothing for Free Speech in and by itself. All of us place too much value on the power of the printed word and the power of the spoken word. We read too much. We listen too much. We live too little. We act too little…. I speak to you by my actions past and present. I have been gagged, I have been been suppressed, I have have been hauled off to jail. Yet every time, more people ave listened to me, more have protested, more have lifted their voices, more have been responded with courage and bravery…. As a propagandist I see immense advantaged in being gagged. It silences me, but it makes millions of others talk about me, and the cause in which I live.”

Margaret Sanger (1879–1966) American birth control activist, educator and nurse

Ford Hall Forum Boston Speech, Woman Rebel, The Margaret Sanger Story, Peter Bagge.

People , Courage , Silence , Time

“The history of medicine proves that in so far as man seeks to know himself and face his whole nature, he has become free from bewildered fear, despondent shame, or arrant hypocrisy. As long as sex is dealt with in the current confusion of ignorance and sophistication, denial and indulgence, suppression and stimulation, punishment and exploitation, secrecy and display, it will be associated with a duplicity and indecency that lead neither to intellectual honesty nor human dignity.”

Alfred Kinsey (1894–1956) American scientist (1894–1956)

Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male (1948)

Fear , Sex , History , Nature

“Count Dashkov: Ah, Mathieu Golovinski, I hear good things about you…I have need for a young man with your talents!
Golivinski: You flatter me, your honor, thank you! Thank you!
Count Dashkov: There is great concern at the tsar’s court these days.. his majesty is quite disturbed by the people’s unrest!
Count Dashkov: I am convinced there is a deep conspiracy afoot in Russia that is poisoning people’s minds.
This evil is a threat to the monarchy itself! But it must be suppressed with powerful weapons!
Golivinski: Weapons?
Count Dashkov: Documentation, my boy…proof of their villainous conspiracy! Proof is the weapon!’’’
And you are skilled at fashioning such weapons, my boy!
So…here, I am recommending you to general of the holy synod.
Golivinski: The synod is a Christian orthodoxy…it’s members are active in proselytizing
Count Dashkov: Exactly! They have been helping the tsar by bringing Christianity to the pagan peasants in the volga…from that office any information will be accepted without question by the public!
So…do you have any question or doubts about getting involved with them?
Golivinski: Oh no!! It matters little to me.
I serve loyally whoever pays me, sir.”

Will Eisner (1917–2005) American cartoonist

Source: The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (10/2/2005), pp. 40-42

People , Boy , Fashion , Question

“The Inquisitor is the forgiving father, the scientific materialist, and the social engineer. He is the most compassionate, and honest, of politicians; he takes on great burdens of responsibility in order to protect his subjects from ethical doubt. But he also suppresses any attempt to expand their self-consciousness: he is the ‘great simplifier’, the shepherd to a flock of carefree children.”

John Carroll (1944) Australian professor and author

Source: Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), p. 153

Children , Forgiveness

“To become the ruling class and defeat the bourgeoisie the proletariat must be schooled, because the skill this implies does not come ready-made, The proletariat must do its learning in the struggle, and stubborn, desperate struggle in earnest is the only real teacher. The greater the extremes of the exploiters' resistance, the more vigorously, firmly, ruthlessly and successfully will they be suppressed by the exploited.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

"Fight at the fall of the old and the Fight for the New", Lenin Anthology
Attributions

School , Learning , Teachers

“In later years, I argued with Professor Julian Aleksandrowicz because he used some therapeutic activities that I did not like, such as the debatable use of suppressive drugs. I once criticized him for that in public. I was already a professor when I had a nice conversation with Professor Aleksandrowicz. I started, „Sir, as a scientist, I …”. He interrupted me saying – „There are three categories of people involved in science: scientists, these are the ones who take the test tubes, they pour something into them; there are lettered scholars, like you; and finally, sir, there are sages.” Someone later pointed out that I did not answer him – „You are a sage, sir.””

Włodzimierz Ptak (1928–2019) immunologist

Aleksandrowicz had something of a sage in himself.
Kobos, Andrzej (2009). Po drogach uczonych (in Polish). 4. Kraków: Polska Akademia Umiejętności, pp. 383–398. ISBN 978-83-7676-021-6.

People , Science

“As early as in the time of Sultan Iltutmish (1210-1236), soon after the establishment of the Delhi Sultanate in 1206, some Ulama suggested to him to confront the Hindus with a choice between Islam and death. The Wazir Nizamul Mulk Junaidi replied: “But at the moment in India… the Muslims are so few that they are like salt (in a large dish). If such orders are to be enforced… the Hindus might combine… and the Muslims would be too few in number to suppress(them). However, after a few years when in the capital and in the regions and small towns, the Muslims are well established and the troops are larger, it will be possible to give Hindus, the choice of ‘death’ or ‘Islam’.”68”

Iltutmish (1210–1236) Sultan of Mamluk Sultanate

Ziyauddin Barani, Sana-i-Muhammadi in Medieval India Quarterly, Aligarh, I, Part III, pp. 100-105. quoted in K.S. Lal, Legacy of Muslim rule in India, 1992.

Death , Time

“Government was intended to suppress injustice, but its effect has been to embody and perpetuate it.”

William Godwin (1756–1836) English journalist, political philosopher and novelist

"Summary of Principles" 2.7
Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793)
Variant: Government was intended to suppress injustice, but it offers new occasions and temptations for the commission of it.

“The social effects which are usually enumerated do not constitute a reconstruction of society on a Christian basis, but were mainly a suppression of some of the most glaring evils in the social system of the time.”

Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918) United States Baptist theologian

Source: Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907), Ch.4 Why Has Christianity Never Undertaken the Work of Social Reconstruction?, p. 149

Evil , Time

“We must agree right now that the Bill of Rights takes precedence over everything else and may not be suppressed by a pall of political correctness on campuses, in the media, in corporate life, or anywhere else. There is no right not to be offended by the free expression of others. Those of us who can afford it should sue those who try to deprive us of our freedom of speech. Mine is worth at least ten figures.”

L. Neil Smith (1946) American writer

"Revenge of the Cookie Monster" http://www.ncc-1776.org/tle2010/tle555-20100131-04.html 31 January 2010.

Life , Freedom

“Hasan Nizami writes that after the suppression of a Hindu revolt at Kol (Aligarh) in 1193 AD, Aibak raised “three bastions as high as heaven with their heads, and their carcases became food for beasts of prey. The tract was freed from idols and idol-worship and the foundations of infidelism were destroyed.” In 1194 AD Aibak destroyed 27 Hindu temples at Delhi and built the Quwwat-ul-Islãm mosque with their debris. According to Nizami, Aibak “adorned it with the stones and gold obtained from the temples which had been demolished by elephants”. In 1195 AD the Mher tribe of Ajmer rose in revolt, and the Chaulukyas of Gujarat came to their assistance. Aibak had to invite re-inforcements from Ghazni before he could meet the challenge. In 1196 AD he advanced against Anahilwar Patan, the capital of Gujarat. Nizami writes that after Raja Karan was defeated and forced to flee, “fifty thousand infidels were despatched to hell by the sword” and “more than twenty thousand slaves, and cattle beyond all calculation fell into the hands of the victors”. The city was sacked, its temples demolished, and its palaces plundered. On his return to Ajmer, Aibak destroyed the Sanskrit College of Visaladeva, and laid the foundations of a mosque which came to be known as ADhãî Din kã JhoMpaDã. Conquest of Kalinjar in 1202 AD was Aibak’s crowning achievement. Nizami concludes: “The temples were converted into mosques… Fifty thousand men came under the collar of slavery and the plain became black as pitch with Hindus.””

Hasan Nizami Persian language poet and historian

Hasan Nizami, quoted from Goel, Sita Ram (2001). The story of Islamic imperialism in India. ISBN 9788185990231 Ch. 6

Men , Food , Hell

“All primitive people thought that a lunatic was possessed by a spirit. When his incoherent words more or less accord with the moral prejudices of the time, the spirit is a good one, and the man i s a saint. In the opposite case, the spirit is evil and the man must be suppressed. It is just according to the time and place and the doctors, whether a prophetess would be worshipped as a priestess or ducked as a witch. Innumerable violent lunatics have escaped the cells, thanks to the War, and their very violence has made heroes of them. And in every Parliament there are at least five or six undisputed idiots who got elected for their madness through the admiration of their constituents.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

Les silences du colonel Bramble (The Silence of Colonel Bramble)

War , People , Evil , Time

“As it is necessary not to invite robbery by supineness, so it is our duty not to suppress tenderness by suspicion; it is better to suffer wrong than to do it, and happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust.”

Samuel Johnson The Rambler

No. 79 (18 December 1750)
The Rambler (1750–1752)

Suffering , Cheating

“The so-called natural sentiments of the average man are mostly the inherited prejudices of the once suppressed classes. The emphasis upon natural goodness is, psychologically speaking, unwillingness to submit such prejudices to wholesome self-criticism. Hence the democratic government tends to support each crowd in its delusion of infallibility. The crowd rationalizes its will to rule in terms of narrow and parochial ideas of righteousness and seeks to force conformity to such ideas upon all. The imagined vindication of the common man's notions of goodness is regarded as the ultimate triumph of righteousness. Hence democracy has always manifested a certain crusading spirit, and the democratic Utopia is envisaged as a sort of Roman peace with "righteousness" established by force rather than assent.”

Everett Dean Martin (1880–1941)

Source: The Conflict of the Individual and the Mass in the Modern World (1932), p. 22

Peace , Democracy , Imagination , Idea

“The reified focus on the moment of literary production, in a distanced context—the typical topic of periodization—suppresses the experience of reception, the actualization of the past in the reader’s present.”

Russell Berman (1950) American academic

Source: Fiction Sets You Free: Literature, Liberty and Western Culture (2007), p. 20.

Past

“English: New York swines. Listen, I was a dissident, suppressed by the KGB, unlike very many present fighters for democracy. I never, in principle, in the program — it didn't occur to me that I should leave this country. It is my country. Mine!”

Mikhail Leontyev (1958) Russian television pundit

Сволочи нью-йоркские. Слушай, я был диссидентом, профилактированным КГБ, в отличие от очень многих нынешних борцов за демократию. Я никогда, у меня в принципе, в программе, в голове не сидело, что я могу из этой страны уехать. Это моя страна. Моя!
Михаил Леонтьев: "Пид…в не люблю! Это зря ты. Наверное, зря" (Стенограмма прямого эфира), Federal Post, 2005-01-24, 2007-03-25 http://www.federalpost.ru/www/print_18140.html,

Democracy , Swine , Country

“A United States of Europe is possible as an agreement between the European capitalists … but to what end? Only for the purpose of jointly suppressing socialism in Europe”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

Collected Works, Vol. 21, p 341.
Collected Works

“He knows that law is the adhesive force in the cement of society, creating order out of chaos and coherence in place of anarchy. He knows that for one man to defy a law or court order he does not like is to invite others to defy those which they do not like, leading to a breakdown of all justice and all order. He knows, too, that every fellowman is entitled to be regarded with decency and treated with dignity. Any educated citizen who seeks to subvert the law, to suppress freedom, or to subject other human beings to acts that are less than human, degrades his heritage, ignores his learning, and betrays his obligation.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

1963, Address at Vanderbilt University

Education , Justice , Law , Freedom

“I Have often thought if the minds of men were laid open, we should see but little difference between that of the wise man and that of the fool. There are infinite reveries, numberless extravagances, and a perpetual train of vanities which pass through both. The great difference is, that the first knows how to pick and cull his thoughts for conversation, by suppressing some, and communicating others; whereas the other lets them all indifferently fly out in words.”

Joseph Addison (1672–1719) politician, writer and playwright

No. 225.
The Tatler (1711–1714)

Men , Fools , Communication , Flying

“It is hard for you to appreciate that modern mathematics has become so extensive and so complex that it is essential, if mathematics is to stay as a whole and not become a pile of little bits of research, to provide a unification, which absorbs in some simple and general theories all the common substrata of the diverse branches if the science, suppressing what is not so useful and necessary, and leaving intact what is truly the specific detail of each big problem. This is the good one can achieve with axiomatics (and this is no small achievement). This is what Bourbaki is up to.”

André Weil (1906–1998) French mathematician

as translated by Martin H. Krieger "A 1940 letter of André Weil on analogy in mathematics." http://www.ams.org/notices/200503/fea-weil.pdf Notices of the AMS 52, no. 3 (2005) pp. 334–341, quote on p. 341

Mathematics , Problem , Science

“We want an extraordinary heavy taxation, with a progressive character, on capital, that will represent an authentic partial expropriation of all wealth; seizures of all assets of religious congregations and suppression of all the ecclesiastic Episcopal revenues, in what constitutes an enormous deficit of the nation and a privilege for a minority; revisions of all contracts made by the war ministers and seizure of 85% of all war profits.”

Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) Duce and President of the Council of Ministers of Italy. Leader of the National Fascist Party and subsequen…

From Mussolini's Fasci Italiani di Combattimento (Italian Combat Fasci), Il Popolo d'Italia newspaper, June 6, 1919. Speech published in Revolutionary Fascism, by Erik Norling, Lisbon, Finis Mundi Press (2011) p. 92.
1910s

War , Wealth

“All historical evidence seems to be that the party of chaos is suppressed by the party of order.”

Nick Land (1962) British philosopher

"‘The Only Thing I Would Impose is Fragmentation’ Interview with Nick Land" https://syntheticzero.net/2017/06/19/the-only-thing-i-would-impose-is-fragmentation-an-interview-with-nick-land/ (2017)

“What causes [fragmentation] if not a need to act that specializes us and limits us to the horizon of a particular activity? Even if it turns out to be for the general interest (which generally isn’t true), the activity that subordinates each of our aspects to a specific result suppresses our being as an entirety. Whoever acts substitutes a particular end for what he or she is, as a total being.”

Georges Bataille (1897–1962) French intellectual and literary figure

Source: On Nietzsche (1945), p. xxvi

“The doctrine of Right and Wrong, is perpetually disputed, both by Pen and the Sword: Whereas the doctrine of Lines, and Figures, is not so; because men care not, in that subject what be truth, as a thing that crosses no mans ambition, profit, or lust. For I doubt not, but if it had been a thing contrary to any mans right of dominion, or to the interest of men that have dominion, That the three Angles of a Triangle, should be equall to two Angles of a Square; that doctrine should have been, if not disputed, yet by the burning of all books of Geometry, suppressed, as far as he whom it concerned was able.”

Thomas Hobbes book Leviathan

The First Part, Chapter 11, p. 80-81
Leviathan (1651)

Men , Truth , Books

“I hold no brief for Communists, but I believe in and will defend their right to act independently within the law. I question whether members of the committee are interested in defending our form of government or whether they are attempting to suppress political opinion at odds with their own.”

Gregory Peck (1916–2003) American actor

On the Red Scare and the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Gregory Peck: A Charmed Life by Lynn Haney (2003). page 167. ISBN 0786714735.

Law , Question

““In the year 817, eight hundred and seventeen Hijri, he resolved to march with intent of jihad against the unbelievers of Girnar, a famous fort in Sorath. Raja Mandalik fought with him but was defeated and took refuge in the fort. It is narrated that even though that land (region) this time did not get complete brightness form the lamp of Islam, yet the Sultan subdued the fort of Junagadh situated near the foot of Girnar mountain. Most of the Zamindars of Sorath became submissive and obedient to him and agreed to pay tribute. After that, he demolished the temple of Sayyedpur in the month of Jamadi I of the year 818, eight hundred and eighteen Hijri… In the year 823, eight hundred and twenty-three Hijri, he attended to the establishment of administrative control over his dominion. He suppressed refractoriness wherever it was found. He demolished temples and constructed masjids in their places…”364”

Ahmad Shah I (1389–1442) Indian king who founded Ahmedabad city

Sidhpur (Gujarat) Mir’at-i-Ahmadî, Mirat-i-Ahmdi, translated into English by M.F. Lokhandwala, Baroda, 1965,pp. 37-38.

Mountain , Time

“The university is a vast public utility which turns out future workers in today's vineyard, the military-industrial complex. They've got to be processed in the most efficient way to see to it that they have the fewest dissenting opinions, that they have just those characteristics which are wholly incompatible with being an intellectual. This is a real internal psychological contradiction. People have to suppress the very questions which reading books raises.”

Mario Savio (1942–1996) American activist

Quoted in interview with Jack Fincher, "The University Has Become a Factory," Life magazine (1965-02-26).

People , Books , Way , Question

“True democracy or the swaraj of the masses can never come through untruthful and violent means, for the simple reason that the natural corollary to their use would be to remove all opposition through the suppression or extermination of the antagonists.”

Lal Bahadur Shastri (1904–1966) The second Prime Minister of the Republic of India and a leader of the Indian National Congress party

Democracy , Nature

“Literature should not be suppressed merely because it offends the moral code of the censor.”

William O. Douglas (1898–1980) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Dissenting, Roth v. United States, 354 U.S. 476 (1957)
Judicial opinions

Literature

“Very often people do not seem to understand the difference between control and suppression of an emotion. Say, one has a strong desire to enjoy a certain thing but there is no possibility to fulfil that desire. Here the desire is suppressed. On the other hand a desire for a certain enjoyment comes. The man can easily fulfil that desire, but he knows that the desire is bad for his growth and he discriminates and decides not to have that low desire. Here, it is called control. Suppression is bad and to discriminate, decide and to control an emotion is very good and there is a great need for it in this so-called scientific age.”

Swami Narayanananda (1902–1988) Indian guru

Brahman and the Universe (1978), in Minor Works II (2001), p. 62

People , Age , Understanding , Strong

“Remember three things about censorship. First, it doesn’t work to suppress art or words that you don’t like. Second, trying to censor something just arouses interest in it, as well as resentment towards those who try to tell others what they can or cannot see. Third, exhibiting art or recommending that students read a book does not mean an endorsement of the image or contents.”

Jerry Coyne (1949) American biologist

" National Coalition Against Censorship and PEN defend Met’s showing of a “controversial” painting https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2017/12/09/national-coalition-against-censorship-and-pen-defend-mets-showing-of-a-controversial-painting/" December 9, 2017

Books , Art , Reading

“We are moving towards a situation in which Statism wants to suppress in one area after another, the freedom of Christians to be charitable. In my lifetime, many, many of the things, institutions and agencies that once marked the Christian scene are now gone. They have been ruled out as unfit. Meanwhile the attitude of the state is an interesting one. It is less and less concerned with morality, with anything that deals directly and without restrictions with problems. I think we can see what is happening in one sphere after another, but perhaps best of all in the courts.”

Rousas John Rushdoony (1916–2001) American theologian

Audio lectures, Christian Charity vs Welfarism (September 4, 1996)

Problem , Thinking , Freedom

“In use of the broad powers with which I have been invested, I have found it proper to declare that
1. Priests of any cult who, abusing their ministry, excite hate or disrespect for our laws, our government, or its rights, will be punished by three years’ imprisonment or deportation.
2. Because of the present crisis all cathedral chapters are suppressed, except for that of Guadalajara because of its patriotic behavior.
3. Priests of all cults are forbidden from wearing their vestments or any other distinguishing garment outside of the churches… All violators will be punished with fines of ten to one hundred pesos or imprisonment from fifteen to sixty days.”

Benito Juárez (1806–1872) President of Mexico during XIX century

Proclamation in response to church officials openly encouraging support for French forces. (30 August 1862)

Hate , Law , Behavior

“I am confident that the suppression of the Kazan Czechs and White Guards, and likewise of the bloodsucking kulaks who support them, will be a model of mercilessness.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

As quoted in George Leggett, The Cheka: Lenin’s Political Police (1981), p. 119.
Attributions

Confidence , Support

“Plastic expression in architecture is inconceivable without colour. Colour and light complete one another. Without colour architecture is expressionless, blind... If the Functionalists wish to suppress colour completely, then this merely proves that they never understood the importance of colour as an ‘architectural’ element, as a means of plastic expression, no matter whether used with iron, glass, or concrete.”

Theo van Doesburg (1883–1931) Dutch architect, painter, draughtsman and writer

Quote in van Doesburg's his article: 'Space – time and colour', in 'De Stijl', Aubette Issue, series xv, 87-9, 1928, pp. 26–27
1926 – 1931

Light

“A mollusk is a cheap edition [of man] with a suppression of the costlier illustrations, designed for dingy circulation, for shelving in an oyster-bank or among the seaweed.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

Power and Laws of Thought (c. 1870)

“As a matter of general principle, I believe there can be no doubt that criticism in time of war is essential to the maintenance of any kind of democratic government … too many people desire to suppress criticism simply because they think that it will give some comfort to the enemy to know that there is such criticism. If that comfort makes the enemy feel better for a few moments, they are welcome to it as far as I am concerned, because the maintenance of the right of criticism in the long run will do the country maintaining it a great deal more good than it will do the enemy, and will prevent mistakes which might otherwise occur.”

Robert A. Taft (1889–1953) politician from the United States, son of 27th US President William Howard Taft

Speech at the Executive Club of Chicago, December 19, 1941

War , People , Feeling , Thinking

“You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change. And that’s precisely what our society is doing!”

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

Source: Hainish Cycle, (1974), Chapter 6 (p. 165)

Idea , Thinking , Change

“American citizens are instrumental in carrying on a traffic in enslaved Africans, equally in violation of the laws of humanity and in defiance of those of their own country. The same just and benevolent motives which produced interdiction in force against the criminal conduct will doubtless be felt by Congress in devising further means of suppressing the evil.”

James Madison (1751–1836) 4th president of the United States (1809 to 1817)

State of the Union address (1810) https://books.google.com/books?id=PsFnB7FA11YC&pg=PA200&dq=%22Rendered+impossible+by+the+prejudices+of+the+whites%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CCMQ6AEwAWoVChMI8uuN6dbUxwIVBD0-Ch1EqwFq#v=onepage&q=%22Rendered%20impossible%20by%20the%20prejudices%20of%20the%20whites%22&f=false
1810s

Law , Motivation , Evil , Country

“Society is eliminating the prerogatives and privileges of feudal. aristocratic culture together with its content. The fact that the transcending truths of the fine arts, the aesthetics of life and thought, were accessible only to the few wealthy and educated was the fault of a repressive society. But this fault is not corrected by paperbacks, general education, long-playing records, and the abolition of formal dress in the theater and concert hall. The cultural privileges expressed the injustice of freedom, the contradiction between ideology and reality, the separation of intellectual from material productivity; but they also provided a protected realm in which the tabooed truths could survive in abstract integrity—remote from the society which suppressed them.”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), pp. 64-65

Life , Truth , Education , Art

“Contemporary liberals think of rights as universal human attributes that can be respected anywhere, but here they show a characteristic disregard of history. Current understandings of human rights developed along with the modern nation-state. It was the nation-state that emancipated individuals from the communal ties of medieval times and created freedom as it has come to be known in the modern world. This was not done without enormous conflict and severe costs. Large-scale violence was an integral feature of the process. If the US became a modern nation only after a civil war, France did so only after the Napoleonic wars and Germany after two world wars and the Cold War. In Africa and the Balkans the struggle for nationhood has run in parallel with ethnic cleansing, while the welding of China into a nation that is underway today involves the suppression of Muslim minorities and something not far from genocide in Tibet.”

John Gray book Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia

Armed Missionaries: Missionary Liberalism, Liberal Imperialism (pp. 238-9)
Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (2007)

War , World , History , Communication

“If we except the great name of Newton (and the exception is one that the great Gauss himself would have been delighted to make) it is probable that no mathematician of any age or country has ever surpassed Gauss in the combination of an abundant fertility of invention with an absolute vigorousness in demonstration, which the ancient Greeks themselves might have envied. It may be admitted, without any disparagement to the eminence of such great mathematicians as Euler and Cauchy that they were so overwhelmed with the exuberant wealth of their own creations, and so fascinated by the interest attaching to the results at which they arrived, that they did not greatly care to expend their time in arranging their ideas in a strictly logical order, or even in establishing by irrefragable proof propositions which they instinctively felt, and could almost see to be true. With Gauss the case was otherwise. It may seem paradoxical, but it is probably nevertheless true that it is precisely the effort after a logical perfection of form which has rendered the writings of Gauss open to the charge of obscurity and unnecessary difficulty. The fact is that there is neither obscurity nor difficulty in his writings, as long as we read them in the submissive spirit in which an intelligent schoolboy is made to read his Euclid. Every assertion that is made is fully proved, and the assertions succeed one another in a perfectly just analogical order… But when we have finished the perusal, we soon begin to feel that our work is but begun, that we are still standing on the threshold of the temple, and that there is a secret which lies behind the veil and is as yet concealed from us. No vestige appears of the process by which the result itself was obtained, perhaps not even a trace of the considerations which suggested the successive steps of the demonstration. Gauss says more than once that for brevity, he gives only the synthesis, and suppresses the analysis of his propositions. Pauca sed matura—few but well matured… If, on the other hand, we turn to a memoir of Euler's, there is a sort of free and luxuriant gracefulness about the whole performance, which tells of the quiet pleasure which Euler must have taken in each step of his work; but we are conscious nevertheless that we are at an immense distance from the severe grandeur of design which is characteristic of all Gauss's greater efforts.”

Henry John Stephen Smith (1826–1883) mathematician

As quoted by Alexander Macfarlane, Lectures on Ten British Physicists of the Nineteenth Century (1916) p. 95, https://books.google.com/books?id=43SBAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA95 "Henry John Stephen Smith (1826-1883) A Lecture delivered March 15, 1902"

Pleasure , Secret , Age , Feeling

“"Oh, goddamn! What the hell?!" [opens fire, then laughs] "Suppressing fire!"”

TotalBiscuit (1984–2018) British game commentator

WTF Is…? series, Insurgency (standalone) (January 29, 2014)

Hell

“The world of their [the bourgeois’] predecessors was a backward, pre-technological world, a world with the good conscience of inequality and toil, in which labor was still a fated misfortune; but a world in which man and nature were not yet organized as things and instrumentalities. With its code of forms and manners. with the style and vocabulary of its literature and philosophy. this past culture expressed the rhythm and content of a universe in which valleys and forests, villages and inns, nobles and villains, salons and courts were a part of the experienced reality. In the verse and prose of this pre-technological culture is the rhythm of those who wander or ride in carriages. who have the time and the pleasure to think, contemplate, feel and narrate. It is an outdated and surpassed culture, and only dreams and childlike regressions can recapture it. But this culture is, in some of its decisive elements. also a post-technological one. Its most advanced images and positions seem to survive their absorption into administered comforts and stimuli; they continue to haunt the consciousness with the possibility of their rebirth in the consummation of technical progress. They are the expression of that free and conscious alienation from the established forms of life with which literature and the arts opposed these forms even where they adorned them. In contrast to the Marxian concept, which denotes man's relation to himself and to his work in capitalist society, the artistic alienation is the conscious transcendence of the alienated existence—a “higher level” or mediated alienation. The conflict with the world of progress, the negation of the order of business, the anti-bourgeois elements in bourgeois literature and art are neither due to the aesthetic lowliness of this order nor to romantic reaction—nostalgic consecration of a disappearing stage of civilization. “Romantic” is a term of condescending defamation which is easily applied to disparaging avant-garde positions, just as the term “decadent” far more often denounces the genuinely progressive traits of a dying culture than the real factors of decay. The traditional images of artistic alienation are indeed romantic in as much as they are in aesthetic incompatibility with the developing society. This incompatibility is the token of their truth. What they recall and preserve in memory pertains to the future: images of a gratification that would dissolve the society which suppresses it”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), pp. 59-60

Life , Fate , Pleasure , Truth

“Normal science, the activity in which most scientists inevitably spend almost all their time, is predicated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like. Normal science often suppresses fundamental novelties because they are necessarily subversive of its basic commitments.”

Thomas Kuhn book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Source: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), I. Introduction: A Role of History, p. 5

World , Communication , Science , Time

“People are a bit blind. They don’t see life. Being a photographer I see life, every inch of it. I’m obsessed with nature and animals and the earth; I find concrete things that distract me. Most people are the opposite… they find life boring, squirrels or sparrows boring, whereas I find them fascinating. It has to do with the way we live. It probably started with religion which leads some people astray. To fight over whose god is better has nothing to do with love or spirituality. Perhaps it’s guilt. We are suppressed and spend our time trying to figure out who we are. The most shocking thing I’ve learned concerns abuse, child abuse, animal abuse, abuse to every living creature. There is a world of little Hitlers out there. Slaughterhouses, vivisection and experimenting on animals for no reason is sick. Luckily younger people are becoming more aware.”

Linda McCartney (1941–1998) American photographer

Interview with Linda McCartney http://oobujoobu.tumblr.com/post/10590341050/interview-with-linda-mccartney by Karen Fox, Diamond Hard Music Entertainment, 1989.

Love , Life , God , People

“All agree that under the Constitution slavery in the States is beyond the reach of any human power except that of the respective States themselves wherein it exists. May we not, then, hope that the long agitation on this subject is approaching its end, and that the geographical parties to which it has given birth, so much dreaded by the Father of his Country, will speedily become extinct? Most happy will it be for the country when the public mind shall be diverted from this question to others of more pressing and practical importance. Throughout the whole progress of this agitation, which has scarcely known any intermission for more than twenty years, whilst it has been productive of no positive good to any human being it has been the prolific source of great evils to the master, to the slave, and to the whole country. It has alienated and estranged the people of the sister States from each other, and has even seriously endangered the very existence of the Union. Nor has the danger yet entirely ceased. Under our system there is a remedy for all mere political evils in the sound sense and sober judgment of the people. Time is a great corrective. Political subjects which but a few years ago excited and exasperated the public mind have passed away and are now nearly forgotten. But this question of domestic slavery is of far graver importance than any mere political question, because should the agitation continue it may eventually endanger the personal safety of a large portion of our countrymen where the institution exists. In that event no form of government, however admirable in itself and however productive of material benefits, can compensate for the loss of peace and domestic security around the family altar. Let every Union-loving man, therefore, exert his best influence to suppress this agitation, which since the recent legislation of Congress is without any legitimate object.”

James Buchanan (1791–1868) American politician, 15th President of the United States (in office from 1857 to 1861)

Inaugural address (4 March 1857).

Love , People , Family , Peace

“One thing has struck me as a bit queer. During my two terms of office the whole Democratic press, and the morbidly honest and 'reformatory' portion of the Republican press, thought it horrible to keep U. S. troops stationed in the Southern States, and when they were called upon to protect the lives of negroes– as much citizens under the Constitution as if their skins were white– the country was scarcely large enough to hold the sound of indignation belched forth by them for some years. Now, however, there is no hesitation about exhausting the whole power of the government to suppress a strike on the slightest intimation that danger threatens. All parties agree that this is right, and so do I. If a negro insurrection should arise in South Carolina, Mississippi, or Louisiana, or if the negroes in either of these states, where they are in a large majority, should intimidate the whites from going to the polls, or from exercising any of the rights of American citizens, there would be no division of sentiment as to the duty of the president. It does seem the rule should work both ways.”

Ulysses S. Grant (1822–1885) 18th President of the United States

Regarding keeping U.S. Army soldiers stationed in southern U.S. states to protect the safety and civil rights of freed slaves (26 August 1877), as quoted in The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant: November 1, 1876-September 30, 1878, by U.S. Grant, pp. 251-252.
1870s, Letter to Daniel Ammen (1877)

Way , Exercises , Country

“The mystics aim (Union with Reality) is not the suppression of life but it's intensification”

Evelyn Underhill (1875–1941) British saint, poet, novelist

PART II, CHAPTER I.
Mysticism. A Study of the Nature and Development of Man's Spiritual Consciousness (1911)

Life , Reality

“While it took all of 27 years for the state to finally recognize the atrocities it inflicted on Filipinos whose democratic rights were suppressed under Marcos, the compensation law seeks to give justice to victims of the dark days of oppression and hopefully give an assurance that it will not happen again.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

The Philippine Star http://www.philstar.com/headlines/2013/02/26/913207/hr-law-right-wrongs-past
2013, Mid-Term Campaign Trail

Justice , Law

“It underscores the state of repression in Myanmar and shows that the junta remains oblivious to worldwide criticism of its human rights record, particularly the detention of monks and students demonstrating peacefully as well as the violent suppression of ethnic minorities seeking autonomy.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

2009, Statement: on the latest conviction of Aung San Suu Kyi

“Human society is born in the shadow of religious fear, and in that stage the suppression of heresy is a sacred social duty. Then comes the rise of a priesthood, and the independent thinker is met with punishment in this world and the threat of eternal damnation hereafter. Even today it is from the religious side that the greatest danger to freedom of thought comes. Religion is the last thing that man will civilise.”

Chapman Cohen (1868–1954) British atheist and secularist writer and lecturer

Quoted in The Freethinker, Vol. 84 (G.W. Foote, 1964), p. 215.

World , Fear , Religion , Freedom

“It's widely accepted today that high schools are miserable, nerve-pinching stress machines. They are governed by dim hypocrites; the climate favors the cruelest and shallowest students, and many, if not most students, are constantly suppressing a burning sense of injustice, shame, and powerlessness.”

Mark Ames (1965) American writer and journalist

Part VI: Welcome to the Dollhouse, page 232.
Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion, From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond (2005)

School , Sense

“The lesson from Charlottesville is not how dangerous the neo-Nazis are. It is the unmasking of the Republican party leadership. In the wake of last weekend’s horror and tragedy, let us finally, finally rip off the veneer that Trump’s affinity for white supremacy is distinct from the Republican agenda of voter suppression, renewed mass incarceration and the expulsion of immigrants.”

Russ Feingold (1953) Wisconsin politician; three-term U.S. Senator

Commenting in the aftermath of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in [Feingold, Russ, How the Republican party quietly does the bidding of white supremacists, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/aug/19/republican-party-white-supremacists-charlottesville, 20 August 2018, The Guardian, August 19, 2017]
2017

Quotes about suppression page 2

Quotes about suppression
page 2