How to Use totalitarian in a Sentence

totalitarian

1 of 2 adjective
  • Failed totalitarian regimes tend to give way not to democracies but to mafia states.
    — Jon Lee Anderson, New Yorker, 29 Sep. 2025
  • When totalitarian rule emerges, when people lose their freedoms, cinema is the first to take the hit.
    — Patrick Brzeski, The Hollywood Reporter, 19 Feb. 2023
  • This is a totalitarian system whose presence people feel in their blood and in their flesh on a daily basis.
    — Karl Vick, Time, 29 Sep. 2022
  • While there’s no totalitarian regime in Bulgaria for more than 30 years now, the echo of these times is still here.
    — Emiliano Granada, Variety, 28 Mar. 2022
  • There are certain things that totalitarian coups always do.
    — Jon Wertheim, CBS News, 9 Feb. 2026
  • Panahi has long run afoul of Iran’s totalitarian regime with films that are critical of his government.
    — G. Allen Johnson, San Francisco Chronicle, 2 Dec. 2025
  • The 20th-century totalitarian model has not been banished; it can be brought back, at any place and at any time.
    — Anne Applebaum, The Atlantic, 17 Mar. 2022
  • The men who rule them and their totalitarian allies fear the very freedom that the Polish people cherish.
    — James Freeman, WSJ, 9 Mar. 2022
  • The novel is set in what was once the United States — but is now a totalitarian theocracy.
    — Alexandra Schonfeld, PEOPLE.com, 11 July 2022
  • But one of the lures of totalitarian thinking lies in coherence and melodrama.
    — Literary Hub, 7 Oct. 2025
  • This often happens in totalitarian states when life outside prison still feels like imprisonment, and there is very little left to lose.
    — Ana Diamond, CNN, 21 Oct. 2022
  • To be clear, nothing about living with a pandemic is like living in a totalitarian society.
    — Angela Watercutter, Wired, 30 Apr. 2021
  • In general, the Putin regime, like all totalitarian regimes, aims to prevent people from thinking.
    — Masha Gessen, The New Yorker, 26 June 2023
  • The first thing the Islamic Republic did, like any totalitarian system, was take away our right to live.
    — Azar Nafisi, Time, 3 Feb. 2026
  • And also, these tweets are the expression of (their) anger, and social networks feed the anger, the extremism and totalitarian way of thinking.
    — Elsa Keslassy, Variety, 24 Sep. 2021
  • The path Bukele is marking with his words and deeds passes through all the stages used by populist leaders on their way to the establishment of totalitarian regimes.
    — Andrew Stuttaford, National Review, 10 Sep. 2021
  • Sabotage and subterfuge are key to achieving victory against a big totalitarian regime.
    — Fran Ruiz, Space.com, 5 Dec. 2025
  • Some have cut off their hair as an act of defiance, removing a part of their appearance that for their entire lives had been subject to totalitarian scrutiny.
    — Sune Engel Rasmussen, WSJ, 28 Oct. 2022
  • Cooper Hoffman stars as one of 50 boys who agree to participate in a deadly walkathon in a grim, run-down totalitarian state.
    — Savannah Salazar, Vulture, 10 Jan. 2026
  • Pic is based on the life of Marija Leiko, a stage and silent film star who struggles with fame and love under Stalin’s totalitarian regime.
    — Christopher Vourlias, Variety, 15 Feb. 2024
  • The heartbreaking and ironic thing is that democracy has given rise, through the proper, right voting mechanism, to this kind of totalitarian regime.
    — Zack Sharf, Variety, 20 May 2026
  • The heartbreaking and ironic thing is that democracy has given rise, through the proper, right voting mechanism, to this kind of totalitarian regime.
    — Zack Sharf, Variety, 12 May 2026
  • The heartbreaking and ironic thing is that democracy has given rise, through the proper, right voting mechanism, to this kind of totalitarian regime.
    — Glenn Whipp, Los Angeles Times, 11 May 2026
  • His first novel, The Joke, a satire about life under a totalitarian regime, was published in 1967.
    — Vulture, 12 July 2023
  • No Soviet tanks are poised to roll across the Prussian plains and absorb all Europe in a totalitarian empire.
    — New York Times, 22 Feb. 2022
  • The United States is now trying to ban that spyware, in part because it has been used by totalitarian governments to track opponents.
    — James Brooks, Anchorage Daily News, 5 Mar. 2022
  • The Mother does not appear to have had the totalitarian impulses of a true cult leader, but her teachings inspired a cultlike zealotry in her followers.
    — Zoë Heller, The New Yorker, 5 July 2021
  • Huawei and its billionaire founder once recoiled at the notion that the company is too entangled with China’s totalitarian regime.
    — Andy Meek, BGR, 29 June 2021
  • The show presents its titular team of rogue troopers, who are thrown into the thick of fighting a totalitarian coup d’état with moral dilemma after moral dilemma, and forced to live with their reactions to it.
    — Eric Vilas-Boas and John Maher, Vulture, 7 Oct. 2021
  • Training people to believe they are fated, or even happy, to live without freedom, rights or real choice is the only way a totalitarian society can survive.
    — Culture Critic, Los Angeles Times, 8 Apr. 2026

totalitarian

2 of 2 noun
  • That’s always true of violent radicals and would-be totalitarians.
    — Jonah Goldberg, National Review, 18 Aug. 2017
  • Some of Ellison's most popular works were surrealistic fantasies set in grisly worlds run by totalitarians and conformists.
    — Robert Jablon, USA TODAY, 28 June 2018
  • Surveying the literary output of leaders from Lenin to Kim Jong-il, Kalder asks why so many totalitarians dabble in literature.
    — Colin Dickey, The New Republic, 22 Mar. 2018
  • Alas, the illiberal totalitarians who demanded that the American Conservative Union reverse course denied us a chance to find out.
    — Osita Nwanevu, Slate Magazine, 12 Mar. 2017
  • No reasonable purpose is served by using a term that lumps together totalitarians, autocrats, conservatives and democratic nationalists, as though these are all varieties of a single dark worldview.
    — Yoram Hazony, WSJ, 4 Aug. 2017

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'totalitarian.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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