Activist Quote by Anna Funder

“A great writer is, so to speak, a second government in his country. And for that reason no regime has ever loved great writers,…

— Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Dictatorship is a story about death of others who turn out to be you coincidently.

— Ai Weiwei

By the time of the GDR's demise, two in every 13 citizens were informers.

— Luke Harding

In your dread of dictators you established a state of society in which every ward boss is a dictator, every private employer a dictator,…

— George Bernard Shaw

“I want you to stop being subhuman and become 'yourself'. 'Yourself,' I say. Not the newspaper you read, not your vicious neighbor's opinion, but…

— Wilhelm Reich

Curiously, for all the outpourings of scholarship on Theodore Roosevelt, no one had written a book focused directly on his leadership approach, working in…

— James M Strock

Reading 'Animal Farm' set me free from the dictatorship in my head. I could see all the tactics used by the regime to control…

— Park Yeon-mi

Dictators are interesting, no?

— Martin Parr

Refuse to accept the narrative of history laid down by presidents, prime ministers, generals and journalists.

— Robert Fisk

We need a more complex understanding of writers working under authoritarian or repressive regimes. Something to replace this simpleminded, Cold War-ish equation in which…

— Pankaj Mishra

“The heirs of the French, English, and American revolutions had partly believed in their own phrases about the rights of man, freedom of speech,…

— George Orwell

“During extraordinary historical moments—both world wars, the aftermath of the Great Depression, or the peak of the civil rights era—the usual categories dividing “activists”…

— Naomi Klein