Police-State Quotes – Reflections on State Control

"The more we understand what is happening in the world, the more frustrated we often become, for our knowledge leads to feelings of powerlessness. We feel that we are living in a world in which the citizen has become a mere spectator or a forced actor, and that our personal experience is politically useless and our political will a minor illusion."

Charles Wright Mills

"It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creeds into law if it acquires the political power to do so, and will follow it by suppressing opposition, subverting all education to seize early the minds of the young, and by killing, locking up, or driving underground all heretics."

Robert A. Heinlein

"So long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men."

Voltaire

"The corporations that profit from permanent war need us to be afraid. Fear stops us from objecting to government spending on a bloated military. Fear means we will not ask unpleasant questions of those in power. Fear permits the government to operate in secret. Fear means we are willing to give up our rights and liberties for promises of security. The imposition of fear ensures that the corporations that wrecked the country cannot be challenged. Fear keeps us penned in like livestock."

Chris Hedges

"If we remain fearful, then we will be further stripped of power as we barrel towards this neofeudalistic state where there is a world of masters and serfs, a kind of permanent underclass. That's what's happening; that's what's being created. Rapacious corporate business interests have shattered all kinds of regulations and controls. They have carried out a coup d'etat in slow motion. And it's over; they've won."

Chris Hedges

"Of course, the judiciary is to a considerable extent politically occupied, and every jurist should know this, even if many now suppress it due to political fanaticism. Question: What is the 3rd state exam in the judiciary? Answer: the party book"

Markus Haintz

"The majority of those who are loosely identified by the term 'liberals' are afraid to let themselves discover that what they advocate is statism. They want to keep all the advantages and effects of capitalism, while destroying the cause, and they want to establish statism without its necessary effects. They do not want to know or to admit that they are the champions of dictatorship and slavery."

Ayn Rand

"A lot of the strings that hold us like puppets are really inventions of our own minds. I'm not saying that there aren't armies and police and various ways to punish deviants, but there isn't any way to punish a large number of deviants. It's too expensive to even try. So, the solution is to colonize the minds of children as they're growing up, so that they become their own police, and to report on others who are deviating."

John Taylor Gatto

"The press needs to have the freedom to say all so that certain people don’t have the freedom to do all."

Stewart Alsop

"This concern with the basic condition of freedom -- the absence of physical constraint -- is unquestionably necessary, but is not all that is necessary. It is perfectly possible for a man to be out of prison and yet not free -- to be under no physical constraint and yet to be a psychological captive, compelled to think, feel and act as the representatives of the national State, or of some private interest within the nation, want him to think, feel and act."

Aldous Huxley

"No matter how paranoid or conspiracy-minded you are, what the government is actually doing is worse than you imagine."

William Blum

"You can't give the government the power to do good without also giving it the power to do bad - in fact, to do anything it wants."

Harry Edson Browne

"Whenever a king sees that his people are about to revolt against him, he starts a war with another country."

Napoleon Bonaparte

"“To suppress a rebellion, it is not necessary to act violently. Methods like Hitler's are outdated. It suffices to create such a strong collective conditioning that the very thought of rebellion no longer arises in people's minds.

The ideal would be to shape people from birth and restrict their innate biological abilities. Afterwards, one would continue with conditioning and strictly reduce education to the acquisition of professional skills. An uneducated person has a limited horizon, and the more their thinking is confined to mediocre aspirations, the less capable they are of rebelling.

We must ensure that access to science becomes increasingly difficult and elitist, that a divide forms between people and science, and that information for the general public contains no subversive content. Above all, no philosophy. Here too, we must use the power of persuasion, not open violence.

On television, large-scale entertainment programs are broadcast that appeal exclusively to feelings or instincts. The mind will be occupied with the useless and playful. They can distract their minds from thinking through constant chatter and music.

We will place sexuality at the very top of a person's interest list. There is no better social tranquilizer.

In general, we will do this so that the serious part of existence is eliminated, everything valuable is ridiculed, and frivolity is constantly supported, so that public euphoria becomes the measure of human happiness and a model of freedom.

In this way, conditioning leads to such integration that our only fear is being excluded from the system and thus losing access to the conditions necessary for happiness.

The mass person thus formed must be treated as what he is: like a cow, and one must care for him like a herd. Everything that leads to the apathy of his clear mind is a public good, and everything that could awaken this good must be mocked, suppressed, and fought.

Any doctrine questioning the system must be branded as subversive and terrorist. And those who support it will then be treated as terrorists.”"

Günther Anders

"The State is the Mafia pretending to a Human Rights Organization"

Dave Smith

"The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it. And even if he is not romantic personally he is very apt to spread discontent among those who are."

Henry Louis Mencken

"Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it."

George Orwell

"Thus, the Party rejects and vilifies every principle for which the Socialist movement originally stood, and it chooses to do this in the name of Socialism. It preaches a contempt for the working class unexampled for centuries past, and it dresses its members in a uniform which was at one time peculiar to manual workers and was adopted for that reason. It systematically undermines the solidarity of the family, and it calls its leader by a name which is a direct appeal to the sentiment of family loyalty. Even the names of the four Ministries by which we are governed exhibit a sort of impudence in their deliberate reversal of the facts. The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture, and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from ordinary hypocrisy: they are deliberate exercises in doublethink. For it is only by reconciling contradictions that power can be retained indefinitely."

George Orwell