Meggan

“Don't give over all of your critical faculties to people in power, no matter how admirable those people may appear to be. Beneath the hero's facade you will find a human being who makes human mistakes. Enormous problems arise when human mistakes are made on the grand scale available to a superhero. And sometimes you run into another problem. It is demonstrable that power structures tend to attract people who want power for the sake of power and that a significant proportion of such people are imbalanced — in a word, insane.”
― Frank Herbert

“[Hannah] Arendt wrote about the subjugation of public space - in effect the disappearance of public space, which, by depriving a person of boundaries and agency, rendered him profoundly lonely.”
― Masha Gessen, The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

“A good bureaucracy is the best tool of oppression ever invented.”
― Frank Herbert, The Jesus Incident

“When the word 'totalitarianism' is used in casual Western speech, it conjures the image of a monstruous society in which force is applied to every person at all times. Of course, that would be impossibly inefficient, even for an extremely inefficient state such as the Soviet Union. The economy force in totalitarian societies is achieved through terror. Totalitarianism establishes its own social contract, in which most people will be safe from violence most of the time, provided they stay within certain boundaries and shoulder some of the responsibility for keeping other citizens within the same boundaries. The boundaries are ever-shifting - Arendt described totalitarian societies as producing a state of constant flux and inconsistency - and this requires the population to be ever-vigilant in order to stay abreast of the shifts. A hypersensitivity to signals is essential for survival.”
― Masha Gessen, The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia