Top 77 Quotes About A Police State
#1. We're becoming more of a police state, and the government is doing everything it can to protect its secrets.
Kenneth Eade
#2. I can't stop them. Maybe I can embarrass them from time to time, cost the City some money, but what they're doing here is happening everywhere. We live in a police state and everybody supports the cops.
John Grisham
#3. It is poor civic hygiene to install technologies that could someday facilitate a police state.
Bruce Schneier
#4. Hitler had a police state of the first order. And those who showed any sign of being weak-kneed faced prison or often summary execution. That prevented a lot of people who knew that the war was not going to turn out well for Germany from giving up.
Rick Atkinson
#5. Bemoan being lower-middle-class and colored in a police state that protects only rich white people and movie stars of all races, though I can't think of any Asian-American ones.
Paul Beatty
#6. When only cops have guns, it's called a "police state".
Claire Wolfe
#8. Every time we decide to use our power to influence others, particularly if we're gleeful and hasty, we damage the relationship. We move from enjoying a healthy partnership based on trust and mutual respect to establishing a police state that requires constant monitoring.
Kerry Patterson
#9. Since 9/11, the Bush administration has used that tragic event as a justification to rip up our constitution and our civil liberties. And I honestly believe that one or two 9/11s, and martial law will be declared in our country and we're inching towards a police state.
Michael Moore
#10. One thing about a police state, you can always find the police.
L. Neil Smith
#12. Once the people are terrorized, you can force a police state on them.
Mae Brussell
#13. Only in a police state is the job of a policeman easy.
Orson Welles
#14. There's one overriding issue, namely, that we live in a police state so long as the police get to police themselves. And that is why cops go unindicted.
Russell Simmons
#15. The problem of South Africa is different than the world thinks. There is no native problem. The native worker gets more than white workers do in England! [ ... ] The South African government is not a police state. It's easier on people than the United States government!
L. Ron Hubbard
#16. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None. It's not if, it's when.
Nick Hanauer
#17. You know, very few people really want to become individuals," he says. "People claim they do, but they don't. They want to retain the invisibility of childhood anonymity forever. But that's not possible except in a police state. In an ordinary life, you have to become yourself.
Charles Baxter
#18. It seems appropriate that the author of '1984' was a British citizen. George Orwell must have seen how easily the great British public's lamb-like disposition toward its leaders could be exploited to create a police state.
Heather Brooke
#19. It is the everlasting disgrace of the Clinton Administration that it has chosen to betray America's heritage as a beacon of freedom, and instead to act as the ally and agent of a police state in retrieving one of its prisoners.
David Horowitz
#20. I know L.A. well, but it's a police state.
Morrissey
#21. There was no doubt that there was a vast organization which was making fools of all the liberals in Hollywood and taking their money, that there was a police state among the Left element in Hollywood and Broadway.
Elia Kazan
#22. In a police state, referencing one's rights is seen as an act of aggression.
Philip Schuyler
#23. There's actually a lot of information on a lot of people and that is a major achievement of a police state.
Elliott Colla
#24. Surveillance technologies now available - including the monitoring of virtually all digital information - have advanced to the point where much of the essential apparatus of a police state is already in place.
Al Gore
#25. The only way to ensure democracy functions correctly is to question its governance constantly. Fail to do so and you may awake to find yourself living in a police state.
Stewart Stafford
#26. The free state offers what a police state denies - the privacy of the home, the dignity and peace of mind of the individual.
William O. Douglas
#28. You learn that you either are going to have a police state where you don't have any freedom left, or you're going to build a world that doesn't create terrorists - and that means a whole different way of 'getting along.'
John Shelby Spong
#29. My symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the offices of a thoroughly nasty business concern.
C.S. Lewis
#30. Unless we abandon elements which resemble a police state, we can't meet the demands of being a modern society.
Ahmet Necdet Sezner
#31. Ten minutes in a video store should convince any impartial observer that we live in a police state of consciousness, far more pervasive than the Nazis.
Hakim Bey
#32. As a nation, we have been responsible for the murder of literally hundreds of thousands of people at home and abroad by fighting a war that should never have been started and can be won, if at all, only by converting the United States into a police state.
Milton Friedman
#33. I think perhaps of all the things a police state can do to its citizens, distorting history is possibly the most pernicious.
Robert A. Heinlein
#34. A police state finds that it cannot command the grain to grow.
John F. Kennedy
#35. As for civil liberties, any one who is not vigilant may one day find himself living, if not in a police state, at least in a police city.
Gore Vidal
#36. I'd never been in a police state. I didn't know what it was. I knew that it was, in the general way that people know that two and two is four, but it had no emotional value for me until I found myself in the middle of it.
Alan Furst
#37. When making public policy decisions about new technologies for the Government, I think one should ask oneself which technologies would best strengthen the hand of a police state. Then, do not allow the Government to deploy those technologies.
Phil Zimmermann
#38. Incidentally, our railroad facilities are under video surveillance by the federal police. However, the federal and state governments will have to determine whether video surveillance shouldn't be significantly expanded to a certain degree.
Otto Schily
#39. If the great figures of this nation's history were alive today, they would all have to say that they committed a felony when they applied for a job at McDonald's.
Justin King
#40. I wish to give officials greater discretion. The State's authority will be increased thereby. I wish to transform the non-political criminal police into a political instrument of the highest State authority.
Adolf Hitler
#41. ARE YOU ASKING ME WHAT THOUGHTS YOU SHOULD THINK?? What kind of Orwellian police state do you think I'm running here? Think whatever thoughts come into your thinking device, sir. (response to a reader asking what to keep in mind while reading Warm Bodies)
Isaac Marion
#42. Whether one is dealing with the state, the Mafia, parents, pimps, police, or husbands, the heavy price of institutionalised protection is always a measure of dependence and agreement to abide by the protector's rules
Wendy Brown
#43. TO MAKE A LONG STORY SHORT
To make a long story short
I leave all my possessions
to the Municipal Slaughterhouse
to the Special Unit of the Police Department
to Lucky Dog Lotto
So now if you want you can shoot
Nicanor Parra
#44. The Eskimos have thirty words for describing different kinds of snow, and modern Russian has about the same number of expressions to describe giving a bribe to a state official.
Victor Pelevin
#45. It is within the police power of the state to prohibit public use of fighting words that create a danger of breach of the peace, but simply to prohibit public use of fighting words is too broad. Those words may sometimes be used in situations where there is no danger.
Ithiel De Sola Pool
#46. She thought briefly of one police force in a neighboring state, some years back, which without a second thought had for many years classified people murdered in its jurisdiction as "male victim," "female victim," and "prostitute.
Diane Duane
#47. Communism may be over as an economic system, but as a model of state domination, it is very much alive in the People's Republic of China and in Putin's police state.
Michael Ignatieff
#48. The web of influence which News Corporation spun in Britain, which effectively bent politicians, police and many others in public life to its will, amounted to a shadow state.
Thomas Watson Jr.
#49. Once Joe Paterno learned that his former assistant coach Jerry Sandusky was showering with a young boy in the Penn State football locker room, he had two choices: think of the child as his own and call police. Or not. He chose the latter.
Christine Pelosi
#50. I came to the United States because I valued living as a free person, one who is able to advocate in a democratic society. Unfortunately, the U.S. has been turning into a less free society, a police and surveillance state, especially after 9/11.
Sami Al-Arian
#51. Numbered are the days
of hunger stricken strays
a woman's curving taste
a paper police state.
Virginia Petrucci
#52. If middle-class Americans do not feel threatened by the slow encroachment of the police state or the Patriot Act, it is because they live comfortably enough and exercise their liberties very lightly, never testing the boundaries. You never know you are in a prison unless you try the door.
Joe Bageant
#53. Such an atmosphere is un-American, the most un-American thing we have to contend with today. It is the climate of a totalitarian country in which scientists are expected to change their theories to match changes in the police state's propaganda line.
Harry S. Truman
#54. Out popped Paul Duffy, in plain clothes except for a state police windbreaker and a badge clipped to his belt. He looked at me - I think by now I had dropped the bat to my side, at least, though I must have looked ridiculous anyway - and he raised his eyebrows. 'Get back in the house, Babe Ruth.
William Landay
#55. Neither the state guards nor the municipal police stopped me. What they saw going by was no longer a man but the curious product of misfortune, something to which laws could not be applied. I had exceeded the bounds of indecency.
Jean Genet
#56. A giant motherboard of geese,
unruffled by the state
police, swarmed in unison,
in harmony...
Kristen Henderson
#57. Just as Hitler used the Reichstag burning, the U.S. government now uses the so-called two wars, the War on Drugs and the War on Terrorism, to fuel fear in the population and establish a police security state.
Ralph Metzner
#58. [The Soviet State Security Service] is more than a secret police organization, more than an intelligence and counter-intelligence organization. It is an instrument for subversion, manipulation and violence, for secret intervention in the affairs of other countries.
Allen W. Dulles
#59. I predicted that if control of drugs were administered by law enforcement agencies, the result would be a black market more irrational and widespread than that of alcohol prohibition and the growth of enormous police-state repressive bureaucracy. And who, indeed, wanted that?
Timothy Leary
#60. Fifty thousand people in Mexico have been murdered. Puerto Penasco, 60 miles south of our border, just had five people and a police officer killed. That is like part of Arizona, and it is spilling over into our state.
Jan Brewer
#61. Scientology is a model control system, a state in fact with its own courts, police, rewards and penalties.
William S. Burroughs
#62. I, with a precision that excludes all possibility of misunderstanding, insist on the necessity for a state in this period, but a state without a police opposed to the people.
Jim Williams
#63. He found her utterly fascinating, a nameless, homeless, naked vampire, sleeping away the day in his bed, wanted by state and federal police.
Travis Luedke
#64. I found while driving in Wyoming that wearing a stetson and driving a beat-up pickup meant you could go as fast as you like, while the police picked up Californian winnebagos that went one mph over 55. After all, they wanted to bring money into the state, not merely circulate it.
Terry Pratchett
#65. To be a member of the Communist Party is to have a taste of the police state. It is a diluted taste but is bitter and unforgettable.
Elia Kazan
#66. Looting is a natural response to the unnatural and inhuman society of commodity abundance. It instantly undermines the commodity as such, and it also exposes what the commodity ultimately implies: the army, the police and the other specialized detachments of the state's monopoly of armed violence.
Guy Debord
#67. My father was a sergeant with the Connecticut state police. My mother was a hairstylist.
Michael Bergin
#68. Should assaulting an officer of the state be a capital offense, rendered without trial, with the officer as judge and executioner? Is that what we wish civilization to be?
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#69. And it would be over in a flash. The state police are providing
John Grisham
#70. [I]t's become standard practice to erect a miniature police state around any globalization summit, and these rights free zones seem to prefigure what corporate globalization promises.
Rebecca Solnit
#71. from endless leg lifts and sit-ups in a gravel parking lot. When my calling to the Michigan State Police came with the murder of Howard Stoker, Rene's advice would cause me to examine carefully my own chain, and strive to strengthen all its
Clif Edwards
#72. Soviet power is a new type of state in which there is no bureacracy, no police, no standing army.
Vladimir Lenin
#73. Where Church and State are habitually associated, it is natural that minds, even of a high order, should unconsciously come to regard religion as only a subtler mode of police.
James Russell Lowell
#74. Americans have no idea why they have been at war in the Middle East, Asia and Africa for a decade. They don't realize that their liberties have been supplanted by a Gestapo Police State. Few understand that hard economic times are here to stay.
Paul Craig Roberts
#75. A man could rant and smash and grapple with the State Police, and still the sprinklers whirled at dusk on every lawn and the television droned in every living room.
Richard Yates
#76. The police of a state should never be stronger or better armed than the citizenry. An armed citizenry, willing to fight, is the foundation of civil freedom. That's a personal evaluation, of course.
Robert A. Heinlein
#77. Liberalism had come to mean spending more on everything-speech police, failed poverty programs that reward dependence, a bigger nanny state telling us we cannot eat fatty foods, workplace roles that stifle opportunity, and absurd environmental regulations.
John Stossel
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