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Then you have people who say, "It must be a totalitarian society. Only a totalitarian system like Bolshevism or... Nazism. The immense powers of industry can only be controlled by a totalitarian society."

— Yuval Noah Harari Next Phase of Intelligence (2026)

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More quotes by Yuval Noah Harari

Anyone who has read a novel by Alexander Solzhenitsyn knows how Communism's egalitarian ideal produced brutal tyrannies that tried to control every aspect of life.

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011)

As far as we can tell from a purely scientific viewpoint, human life has absolutely no meaning.

Religion can thus be defined as a system of human laws that is founded on a belief in superhuman laws.

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011)

Democracies die not only when people are not free to talk but also when people are not willing or able to listen.

Presidents and generals may not understand nuclear physics, but they have a good grasp of what nuclear bombs can do.

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011)

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The moment the idea is admitted into society, that property is not as sacred as the law of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence.

John Adams A Defence of the Constitutions of Government (1787)

There is no governor anywhere; you are all absolutely free. There is no restraint that cannot be escaped.

Robert Anton Wilson

When we see a great man desiring power instead of his real goal we soon recognize that he is sick, or more precisely that his attitude to his work is sick.

Martin Buber What is Man? (1938)

Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.

C. S. Lewis God in the Dock (1970)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Yuval Noah Harari (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.