Surveillance State Quotes – Reflections on Monitoring

"As proposals for action along new lines arise to compete for the moral and physical support of masses, propaganda attains eminence as the one means of mass mobilization which is cheaper than violence, bribery or other possible control techniques."

Harold D. Lasswell

"Nothing appears more surprizing to those, who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye, than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few; and the implicit submission, with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers."

David Hume

"The power structures that have emerged are not democratically legitimized, and they can no longer be voted out of office through any electoral process. The most important power structures in our society are no longer accessible to the voter at all… and one does not want the ordinary citizen to even know that they exist. They are meant to remain invisible within the framework of public debate."

Prof. Rainer Mausfeld

"The fundamental problem with our democracy is that it is not one. The people—the nominal ruler and sovereign—have, in reality, nothing to say. … Behind the democratic façade, a system has been installed in which completely different rules apply than those of the Basic Law. The system is undemocratic and corrupt; it abuses power and unscrupulously deceives citizens. … Every German is free to obey laws to which he has never consented; he may admire the majesty of the Basic Law, whose validity he has never legitimized; he is free to pay homage to politicians whom no citizen has ever elected, and to provide for them lavishly—with his tax money, about the use of which he has never been consulted. Overall, the state and politics are in a condition of which only professional optimists or hypocrites can claim it has arisen from the will of the citizens."

Prof. Dr. Hans Herbert von Arnim

"Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas."

Josef Stalin

"Hundreds of billions of dollars are spent every year to control the public mind"

Noam Chomsky

"It is hardly necessary to point out that the inability of the masses to judge correctly deprives them of any capacity for critical thought—that is, the ability to distinguish truth from error and to form a sound judgment. The judgments adopted by the masses are merely imposed on them and are never the result of careful examination. Many individuals, in this respect, do not rise above the level of the crowd. The ease with which certain opinions become widely accepted is due above all to the inability of most people to form an opinion of their own on the basis of personal reasoning."

Gustave Le Bon

"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root"

Henry David Thoreau

"It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong."

Voltaire

"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."

Martin Luther King

"Fear of the virus—fear of getting sick, fear of dying—is the most effective distraction one can politically set in motion: to intimidate people and focus them on that fear so completely that, in the end, you can basically do whatever you want with us."

Dr. Hans-Joachim Maaz

"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power."

Benito Mussolini

"Fascism, Nazism, Communism and Socialism are only superficial variations of the same monstrous theme—collectivism."

Ayn Rand

"The state, rather, is a parasitic institution that lives off the wealth of its subjects, concealing its anti-social, predatory nature beneath a public-interest veneer."

Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr.

"Government is the illusion of authority, but more importantly government is mind control. Naturally, since if you want people to believe in this fictitious thing called ‘authority’ you first have to mold the minds of the collective to accept this false ideology. This is what government is. It’s the illusion of some “official” group of people out there who get to tell everybody else what to do and how to do it. The truth is there is no such thing as authority, and government is an illusion that we’ve imposed upon ourselves from the irrational thinking of a controlled mind.

It’s generally agreed that the power of government ultimately comes from the people. Governments seem to have rights that individuals do not. And it’s agreed that it is these individuals that make up government. It doesn’t take much critical thinking to realize that individuals are granting power that they don’t possess to a group of other individuals who call themselves ‘government’. One cannot delegate a right that they do not possess individually. This is one of the fundamental reasons why government is completely and utterly fallacious."

Joe Dubs

"The tactic of the ‘Querdenker’ movement is to gradually fight for control of the streets. The police must act—and if necessary, use pepper spray and batons. We must not give them an inch!"

Saskia Lea Raquel Weishaupt

"Who dares not speak his free thought is a slave."

Euripides

"When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it."

Claude Frédéric Bastiat