A Quote by T. S. Eliot

I suspect that in our loathing of totalitarianism, there is infused a good deal of admiration for its efficiency.

T. S. Eliot

Quote Topics

Admiration Deal Efficiency Good Good Deal Loathing Our Suspect Totalitarianism

Quote Author

T. S. Eliot
American - Poet
September 26, 1888 - January 4, 1965

Our culture has few taboos that can't be violated, and our establishment has largely given up on setting standards in the first place. Except where Islam is concerned. There, the standards are established under threat of violence, and accepted out of a mix of self-preservation and self-loathing. This is what decadence looks like: a frantic coarseness that "bravely" trashes its own values and traditions, and then knuckles under swiftly to totalitarianism and brute force.

Ross Douthat

The Iraqi Baath Socialist Party was modelled in large part on admiration for European National Socialist and Fascist movements, hoped to emulate them especially in their nationalism against the West. But mutated by Saddam Hussein it became also one that very, very much admired, and grew a special moustache in admiration of the work of Yosif Vissarionovitch Dzugashvili, the great Georgian known to us historically as Stalin. So you had him in modern Iraq, a regime in our own time, that was openly, directly modelled upon the two most extreme examples of European totalitarianism.

Christopher Hitchens

We are always paid for our suspicion by finding what we suspect. [So why not suspect good rather than bad in events, people and life and thereby find it more?]

Henry David Thoreau

None of the evils which totalitarianism ... claims to remedy is worse than totalitarianism itself.

Albert Camus

When we feel a strong desire to thrust our advice upon others, it is usually because we suspect their weakness; but we ought rather to suspect our own.

Charles Caleb Colton

Actually, the curious thing is that the more you become a subject of admiration or loathing, the more you're examined under a microscope, the distance seems to open up between who you really are and the portrayals that people impose on you.

Nick Clegg

In the mainstream, I'm suspect because I'm black. I have dreadlocks, I have a goatee. I mean, I'm just suspect. In my classroom and at Columbia, I'm not as suspect because it's clear I know what I'm doing, but I am still suspect.

Carl Hart

Our admiration of the antique is not admiration of the old, but of the natural.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The basic premise of math is about efficiency. And when you've got racism, sexism, and bigotry, that's just standing in the way of efficiency in our own progress.

Glen Powell

But obviously, we're looking for all good ideas to help deal with our long-term debt problem. This is something that is going to affect our economy. It affects our kids. And we need to deal with it.

David Axelrod

It is as hard for the good to suspect evil, as it is for the bad to suspect good.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

I think, in our modern cities, there are a lot of boxes; there are a lot of straight lines. They often deal with efficiency, the function, the structure.

Ma Yansong

Back in the mid-1970s, we adopted some fairly ambitious goals to improve efficiency of our cars. What did we get? We got a tremendous boost in efficiency.

Jay Inslee

Staying, we all know, is not the norm in our mobile culture. A great deal of money is spent each day to create desires in each of us that can never be fulfilled. I suspect that much of our restlessness is a return on this investment.

Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

Most people may not think about it, but the aftermath of war is very costly. Costly not just in lives, but the treatment. Because of the efficiency of our transportation system, the efficiency of our medical technicians, people are surviving.