Red Scare Quotes

“No one man can terrorize a whole nation unless we are all his accomplices.”
― Edward R. Murrow

“Don't make a career out of underestimating me." — Claire de Haven”
― James Ellroy, The Big Nowhere

“There are today many Communists in America. They are everywhere -- in factories, offices, butcher stores, on street corners, in private businesses. And each carries in himself the germ of death for society.”
― J. Howard McGrath

“The paranoid, real or pretended, always secretes its pearl around a grain of fact.”
― Arthur Miller

“American foreign policy was a mirror image of Russian foreign policy: whatever the Russians did, we did in reverse. American domestic policies were conducted under a kind of upside-down Russian veto: no man could be elected to public office unless he was on record as detesting the Russians, and no proposal could be enacted, from a peace plan at one end to a military budget at the other, unless it could be demonstrated that the Russians wouldn't like it.”
― Archibald MacLeish

“Ernst was still in the Eastern Zone, about ninety kilometres from Berlin, when the truck emerged so inexplicably out of nowhere that it seemed to have been created by the rain itself.”
― Mordecai Richler, A Choice of Enemies

“In an article titled "The Ex-Communists," she analyzed how these McCarthy loyalists had simply switched allegiances. Instead of demanding communism as they had earlier, they now called for unconditional loyalty and cooperation in denouncing others for the sake of freedom and democracy. They still had a cause, just a different one from before. The new cause, the right cause, she continued, had a totalitarian catch to it. By turning democracy "into a cause," something that would arrive in the future and to which the present must be devoted, the present became unfree. The idea of futurity destroyed the present moment.
How could one escape this destruction of the present by fear of the future....?”
― Marie Luise Knott, Unlearning with Hannah Arendt

“Not all of the New Dealers, it must be said, bought into the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan. For instance, Henry Wallace, the former vice president and secretary of agriculture, who was fired by Truman for disagreeing with the Cold War’s imperatives, referred to the Marshall Plan as the ‘Martial Plan’. He warned against creating a rift with America’s wartime ally, the Soviet Union, and remarked that the conditions attached to the Soviet Union’s invitation to be part of the Marshall Plan were intentionally so designed that Stalin would be obliged to reject them (which, of course, he did). A number of academics of the New Deal generation, among them Paul Sweezy and John Kenneth Galbraith, also rejected Truman’s cold-warrior tactics. However, they were soon to be silenced by the witch-hunt orchestrated by Senator Joseph McCarthy and his House Committee on Un-American Activities.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, The Global Minotaur: America, the True Origins of the Financial Crisis and the Future of the World Economy

“Fear doesn't travel well; just as it can warp judgement, its absence can diminish memory's truth.”
― Arthur Miller

“What terrifies one generation is likely to bring only a puzzled smile to the next.”
― Arthur Miller

“The burning coals turned red,
What's gulped down won't come back.
The tiger is lurking in the high steppes, they say,
The Kyrgyz heart is pounding...

Will the Kyrgyz, locked up, now die, alas?
Will every one of our people become a Chinaman, alas?
Will it put fear in the heart, alas?
Will the ugly-faced dark Chinese,
Enjoy trampling us down, alas?”
― Hamid Ismailov, Manaschi