How to Use totalitarian in a Sentence

totalitarian

adjective
Definition of totalitariannext
Synonyms for totalitariannext
  • 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
  • His first novel, The Joke, a satire about life under a totalitarian regime, was published in 1967.
    — Vulture, 12 July 2023
  • The novel is set in what was once the United States — but is now a totalitarian theocracy.
    — Alexandra Schonfeld, PEOPLE.com, 11 July 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • By the mid-1930s, millions saw the totalitarian ideologies of Communism, Nazism and Fascism as the waves of the future.
    — Steve Forbes, Forbes, 28 Nov. 2023
  • 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
  • Huge crowds would fill St. Petersburg’s main squares, thronging groups that did not want to be part of a totalitarian system.
    — Anna Nemtsova, The Atlantic, 10 June 2022
  • 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
  • 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
  • By such means, Putin is imposing a totalitarian regime that seeks to possess sole control of how events are explained to the country—and what Russians are supposed to think about them.
    — Andrei Kolesnikov, Foreign Affairs, 22 Aug. 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
  • As if this were not enough, a multi-polar world would grant greater influence over the very terms of trade and business conduct to the likes of China and other large, totalitarian countries.
    — John Gustavsson, National Review, 10 Sep. 2023
  • In August, 2020, Navalny, a persistent gadfly on the rump of a totalitarian state, was poisoned during a trip to Tomsk, in Siberia.
    — Anthony Lane, The New Yorker, 24 Apr. 2022
  • The miraculous bloodless end of Soviet totalitarian Communism and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 were not bloodless after all.
    — Roger Cohen Nanna Heitmann, New York Times, 6 Aug. 2023
  • 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
  • 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
  • In general, the Putin regime, like all totalitarian regimes, aims to prevent people from thinking.
    — Masha Gessen, The New Yorker, 26 June 2023
  • The right is, of course, wrong to fantasize that the climate crisis is ushering in a totalitarian state in which Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez takes away your hamburgers.
    — Liza Featherstone, The New Republic, 13 Sep. 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
  • As far back as the Sixties, a cottage industry of books pointed at the United Nations as a front for totalitarian world government.
    — Hari Kunzru, Harper’s Magazine , 17 Aug. 2022
  • If a totalitarian regime forcibly occupied TSMC, in other words, its kaiser would never get its partner democracies on the phone.
    — Virginia Heffernan, WIRED, 21 Mar. 2023
  • This argument rested on the assumption that the Soviet totalitarian state would last forever, or at least a very long time, and that the battle against it would be eternal.
    — Masha Gessen, The New Yorker, 13 Apr. 2021
  • 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
  • This is about demonstrating China’s totalitarian resolve to the remnants of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement that have scattered across the globe.
    — The Editors, National Review, 19 Dec. 2023
  • More than arms control and arms buildups, the Helsinki Accords triggered changes that loosened Moscow’s totalitarian grip.
    — Ray Takeyh, WSJ, 2 May 2021
  • Based on the best-selling 1985 novel by Margaret Atwood, the Hulu series told the story of a dystopian, totalitarian society where fertile women were forced to bear children for the state.
    — Stephanie Wenger, Peoplemag, 16 Jan. 2024
  • Forget the science for a second; what kind of political will—totalitarian or otherwise—is required to keep centuries of preparation on track?
    — Inkoo Kang, The New Yorker, 18 Mar. 2024

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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