The Chinese art world does not exist. In a society that restricts individual freedoms and violates human rights anything that calls itself creative or independent is a pretence. It is impossible for a totalitarian society to create anything with passion and imagination.
Great is truth but still greater from a practical point of view is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects... totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively than they could have by the most eloquent denunciations.
Only the freedom of mind can prevent the state from becoming totalitarian and from issuing totalitarian demands.
To us Americans much has been given of us much is required. With all our faults and mistakes it is our strength in support of the freedom our forefathers loved which has saved mankind from subjection to totalitarian power.
Because if you lived as I did several years under Nazi totalitarianism and then 20 years in communist totalitarianism you would certainly realize how precious freedom is and how easy it is to lose your freedom.
Hamas is a terrorist organization dedicated to annihilating the Jewish state. It runs a theocratic totalitarian state in Gaza with no individual liberty and no freedom of speech or press.
A new breeze is blowing and a world refreshed by freedom seems reborn for in man's heart if not in fact the day of the dictator is over. The totalitarian era is passing its old ideas blown away like leaves from an ancient lifeless tree.
I was interested by the idea that artists working in a totalitarian dictatorship or tsarist autocracy are secretly and slightly shamefully envied by artists who work in freedom. They have the gratification of intense interest: the authorities want to put them in jail while there are younger readers for whom what they write is pure oxygen.
The Cuban people still live in constant fear of a brutal totalitarian regime that has demonstrated time and again its utter disregard for basic human dignity. The fight for a free Cuba has gone on for far too long.
Taxation is the price we pay for failing to build a civilized society. The higher the tax level the greater the failure. A centrally planned totalitarian state represents a complete defeat for the civilized world while a totally voluntary society represents its ultimate success.