Quotes & Sayings About Personality Cult

Africa's downfall has always been the cult of the personality. And their names always seem to begin with M. We've had Mobutu and Mengistu and I'm not going to add Meles to the list. — Mengistu Haile Mariam

I look for strong people. I don't like people who'll say yes to everything I might bring up. I want people who can argue and disagree and have a point of view that's reflected in the magazine. My dad believed in the cult of personality. He brought great writers and columnists to 'The Standard.' — Anna Wintour

Politics is the art of persuasion. Good ideas die because due to a lack of charisma or character. — A.E. Samaan

Once in power, Stalin's campaign to succeed Lenin required a legitimate heroic career which he did not possess because of his experience in what he called 'the dirty business' of politics: this could not be told, either because it was too gangsterish for a great, paternalistic statesman or because it was too Georgian for a Russian leader. His solution was a clumsy but all-embracing cult of personality that invented, distorted and concealed the truth. Ironically this self-promotion was so grotesque that it fanned sparks, sometimes innocent ones, which flared up into colossal anti-Stalin conspiracy-theories. It was easy for his political opponents, and later for us historians, to believe that it was all invented and that he had done nothing much at all - particularly since few historians had researched in the Caucasus where so much of his early career took place. An anti-cult, as erroneous as the cult itself, grew up around these conspiracy-theories. — Simon Sebag Montefiore

The status of celebrity offers the promise of being showered with 'all good things' that capitalism has to offer. The grotesque display of celebrity lives (and deaths) is the contemporary form of the cult of personality; those 'famous for being famous' hold out the spectacular promise of the complete erosion of a autonomously lived life in return for an apotheosis as an image. The ideological function of celebrity (and lottery systems) is clear - like a modern 'wheel of fortune' the message is 'all is luck; some are rich, some are poor, that is the way the world is...it could be you! — Guy Debord

As far as I'm concerned, the first business leader who was able to establish a cult of personality around his tenure was Lee Iacocca. — Tom Peters

Many ritually abusive cults deliberately divide the personality system down the middle of the head, making sure that there is no communication between the two sides. "Left side" parts might be instructed to speak to no one other than the perpetrators. — Alison Miller

I applaud strong government, but not overweening government sustained by cronies, ciphers and a personality cult. — Margaret Thatcher

I always have a high regard for the individual and have an insuperable distaste for violence and clubmanship. All these motives made me into a passionate pacifist and anti-militarist. I am against any nationalism, even in the guise of mere patriotism. Privileges based on position and property have always seemed to me unjust and pernicious, as did any exaggerated personality cult. — Albert Einstein

Stalinism is linked with a cult of personality and massive violations of the law, with repression and camps. There is nothing like that in Russia and, I hope, will never again be. — Vladimir Putin

Like the priestly cult of the Middle Ages, the modern priestly cult of "scientific" psychotherapists exist overwhelmingly to stultify or blunt a too-acute insight into the powers benumbed in our personalities by our prevailing culture. — Kenny Smith

Breaking free is only the beginning. Then begins the painful process of reversing the indoctrination. The longer someone stays in a cult the harder it is for them to remember who they were before the cult took control of their mind. Or in the case of someone like me, a cult-born child, my entire personality was made and created by them. When I left I had no idea who I was. My whole existence, everything I thought I knew, had been a lie.

But it is the psychological aftermath of life in a cult that is all too often the silent killer. — Natacha Tormey

It had been Ari who proposed the term Kimunism for the strange form of xenophobic nationalism practiced under the Kim family dynasty; it was not really socialism, nor was it communism in even the Maoist form, despite the heaviness of its cult of personality. Ari had felt that it was the severity and chimeric plasticity of the system, so provocative, that made it appealing to French intellectuals. — David Cronenberg

The cult of individual personalities is always, in my view, unjustified. To be sure, nature distributes her gifts variously among her children. But there are plenty of the well-endowed ones too, thank God, and I am firmly convinced that most of them live quiet, unregarded lives. — Albert Einstein

What happens in the media is the cult of personality. The brands who have been forced to cut their staff have been forced to take on the brands of journalists. — Fareed Zakaria

I discourage a cult of personality. — Newt Gingrich

Every cult of personality that emphasizes the distinguished qualities, virtues, and talents of another person, even though these be of an altogether spiritual nature, is worldly and has no place in the Christian community; indeed, it poisons the Christianity community. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Dandyism is not even, as many unthinking people seem to suppose, an immoderate interest in personal appearance and material elegance. For the true dandy these things are only a symbol of the aristocratic superiority of his personality ... What, then, is this ruling passion that has turned into a creed and created its own skilled tyrants? What is this unwritten constitution that has created so haughty a caste? It is, a bone all, a burning need to to acquire originality, within the apparent bounds of convention, it's is a sort of cult of oneself, which can dispense even with what are commonly called illusions. It is the delight in causing astonishment, and the proud satisfaction of never oneself being astonished. — Charles Baudelaire

Draw your own moral from this, Sparky. And remember at the center of the cult of personality called stardom there is just a big empty hole. Awards don't matter. Acclaim doesn't matter. Only your craft matters. — John Varley

It seems that all revolutions end up with a personality cult - even the Chinese seem to need a father-figure. — John Lennon

The hatred that vibrated beneath the surface of my girl's face-- I think Suzanne recognized it. Of course my hand would anticipate the weight of a knife. The particular give of a human body. There was so much to destroy. — Emma Cline

I hadn't gone to Andover, or Horace Mann or Eton. My high school had been the average kind, and I'd been the best student there. Such was not the case at Eli. Here, I was surrounded by geniuses. I'd figured out early in my college career that there were people like Jenny and Brandon and Lydia and Josh - truly brilliant, truly luminous, whose names would appear in history books that my children and grandchildren would read, and there were people like George and Odile - who through beauty and charm and personality would make the cult of celebrity their own. And then there were people like me. People who, through the arbitrary wisdom of the admissions office, might share space with the big shots for four years, might be their friends, their confidantes, their associates, their lovers - but would live a life well below the global radar. I knew it, and over the years, I'd come to accept it.
And I understood that it didn't make them any better than me. — Diana Peterfreund

We are given to the cult of personality; when things go badly we look to some messiah to save us. If by chance we think we have found one, it will not be long before we destroy him. — Constantine Karamanlis

Within the Nazi Party, the beginnings of a personality cult around Hitler go back to the year before the [Munich] putsch ... Outside these small groups of fanatical Bavarian Nazis, Hitler's image and reputation at this time - so far as the wider German public took any notice of him at all - was little more than that of a vulgar demagogue, capable of drumming up passionate opposition to the government among the Munich mob, but of little else. — Ian Kershaw

I actually think the only way that you can beat Trump is recognizing that he is a one- man wrecking machine fueled by this cult personality. So you have to attack him on those bases. None of these ideological positioning issues matter for [Donald] Trump. — Bernie Sanders

The public figure of the writer, the writer-character, the 'personality-cult' of the author, are all becoming for me more and more intolerable in others, and consequently in myself. — Italo Calvino

What these critics forget is that printing presses in themselves provide no guarantee of an enlightened outcome. People, not machines, made the Renaissance. The printing that takes place in North Korea today, for instance, is nothing more than propaganda for a personality cult. What is important about printing presses is not the mechanism, but the authors. — Jaron Lanier

[My early performance work] started by being the activity of a person, any person, like any other - but once that person became photographed it became a specialized person, the object of a personality cult. — Vito Acconci

These critics organize and practice in my case a sort of obsessive personality cult which philosophers should know how to question and above all, to moderate. — Jacques Derrida

The cult of Mao and the cult of Lei Feng were two faces of the same coin: one was the cult of personality; the other, its essential corollary, was the cult of impersonality — Jung Chang

The Obama campaign seems dangerously close to becoming a cult of personality. — Paul Krugman

By the way, if I have my own cult of personality with my own geodetic dome in western Massachusetts, I will have a hurt yurt for anyone who crosses me. — John Hodgman

Nobody's irreplaceable, including me. I think for too long we've had a cult of personality in this company and in this industry, and frankly, I'd like to see that diminish. — William Clay Ford Jr.

A cult is a cult, and that's what a frat is. A place where they strip you of your personality and rebuild it in their image. — Bill Maher

The whole world is a personality cult. — Anneli Rufus

Just a small-scale cult of personality, maybe raise a geodetic dome out in western Massachusetts and make people wear jumpsuits and give all their possessions to me. — John Hodgman

The cult of individuality and personality, which promotes painters and poets only to promote itself, is really a business. The greater the 'genius' of the personage, the greater the profit. — George Grosz

Political prodigies are rare in a nation that grooms top leaders through decades of Communist Party road-testing and pageantry. And because Chairman Mao's cult of personality led the country into extremism, the Party spent the next three decades engineering its politicians to be as indistinguishable as possible. — Evan Osnos

In a nation of celebrity worshipers, amid followers of the cult of personality, individual modesty becomes a heroic quality. I find heroism in the acceptance of anonymity, in the studied resistance to the normal American tropism toward the limelight. — Shana Alexander

As soon as realized that I was treating MPD clients, I read the few existing books on the condition, attended a workshop at the Justice Institute, and used some sexual abuse prevention money to organize a workshop where therapists could exchange information and educate each other about dissociation. There, I learnt something that I found really shocking. Many people
suffering from MPD had been severely abused throughout their childhood years by organized groups, including Satanic and other "dark-side" religious cults. Moreover, quite a few of them were still involved in those groups, although they were not aware of their involvement, because it was other "personalities" - dissociated parts of them - who went off to the groups' rituals. I was skeptical, to say the least. — Alison Miller

Within a capitalist consumer society, the cult of personality has the power to subsume ideas, to make the person, the personality into the product and not the work itself. — Bell Hooks

There are a few people who are, let's say, personality-challenged, who would like to set up a cult, but in large part they fail due to the innate stroppiness and independence of their fellow pagans. — Liz Williams