Politics & Power Quote by Milos Forman

Forman’s sentence isn’t a lecture about liberty; it’s a lived rebuke to anyone who treats freedom like default settings. The power comes from the mundane arithmetic of oppression: “several years” under one regime, “20 years” under another. He stacks time the way a survivor stacks evidence. No abstract “tyranny” here, just a career-long familiarity with systems that claim to organize life and end up owning it.

As a director who fled Czechoslovakia and then made American films obsessed with institutional control (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Amadeus, The People vs. Larry Flynt), Forman is doing what he always did: translating politics into human-scale pressure. Totalitarianism is not only secret police and slogans; it’s the slow training of a population to self-censor, to anticipate punishment, to accept that the public script matters more than private truth. That’s why “precious” lands so hard. It’s not sentimental. It’s the language of scarcity.

The second jab is aimed at complacency: freedom is “easy” to lose. Not dramatic, not heroic, just easy - through fatigue, fear, convenience, the trade of rights for “stability.” Forman’s subtext is a warning about democratic societies drifting into soft forms of control: propaganda rebranded as entertainment, conformity sold as safety. His authority isn’t philosophical; it’s experiential. He’s telling you he’s seen the movie twice, and the ending doesn’t change.