Surveillance State Quotes

#1. The idea that we should dismantle the core protections of our political system to erect a ubiquitous surveillance state for the sake of this risk is the height of irrationality. Yet exaggeration of the threat is repeated over and over.

Glenn Greenwald

#2. In a surveillance state it was vital to reserve the ability to turn a blind eye to certain people at certain times.

Ramez Naam

#3. The democracy of riot squads, corrupt politicians, magnate-controlled newspapers and the surveillance state looks as phony and fragile as East Germany did thirty years ago.

Paul Mason

#4. With the Patriot Bill in place, the NSA no longer needed to get a warrant from a judge to tap into anybody's electronic information. A Surveillance State that would have boggled the mind of Orwell was born.

Jay Parini

#5. 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

#6. When you try to grasp the way the Western world is going, you see that we are on a ratchet towards a surveillance state, which is coming to include the whole population in its surveillance. This is our reward for accepting the restraints on the way we live now.

Tom Stoppard

#7. Today we are at a crossroads. The technology is available for two great options: The massive surveillance state, or the renewed freedom of a deeply-involved citizenry thinking independently and holding the government to the highest standards.

Oliver DeMille

#8. The surveillance state has run amok. Technology that's enabled us to send selfies 24/7 - not that valuable - has also enabled us to be spied upon us 24/7.

Alexis Ohanian

#9. The National Surveillance State doesn't want anyone to be able to communicate without the authorities being able to monitor that communication.

Barry Eisler

#10. Far from hyperbole, that is the literal, explicitly stated aim of the surveillance state: to collect, store, monitor, and analyze all electronic communication by all people around the globe.

Glenn Greenwald

#11. I did not come to this country for the terror from paramilitary," declared Voytek, hoarsely. "I did not come to this country for motherfucker. But motherfucker is waiting. Always. Is carceral state, surveillance state. Orwell. You have read Orwell?

William Gibson

#12. You have an always-expanding, omnipresent surveillance state that's constantly chipping away at the liberties and freedoms of law-abiding Americans.

Ron Wyden

#13. We all deserve credit for this new surveillance state that we live in because we the people voted for the Patriot Act. Democrats and Republicans alike ... We voted for the people who voted for it, and then voted for the people who reauthorized it, then voted for the people who re-re-authorize d it.

Stephen Colbert

#14. Everyone everywhere now understands how bad things have gotten - and they're talking about it. They have the power to decide for themselves whether they are willing to sacrifice their privacy to the surveillance state.

Edward Snowden

#15. If time is money and you wasted my time, then give me back my money!

Ljupka Cvetanova

#16. The sense of immunity felt by a particular group currently in power is bound to be illusory. That is made clear when we look at how partisan affiliation shapes people's sense of the dangers of state surveillance. What emerges is that yesterday's cheerleaders can quickly become today's dissenters.

Anonymous

#17. Yuri Gagarin had a much more reliable and safe ship than I do. And Soviet ships were death traps.

Andy Weir

#18. Ultimately, if people lose their willingness to recognize that there are times in our history when legality becomes distinct from morality, we aren't just ceding control of our rights to government, but our agency in determining our futures.

Edward Snowden

#19. By the time I was 10, I was doing plays for Phoenix theater. My first lead role was as the Stinky Cheese Man. I got a taste of the limelight, and I just couldn't stop. It was a way for me to be the artistic, geeky kid that I was, and not get beat up.

Alexandra Shipp

#20. 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

#21. To permit surveillance to take root on the Internet would mean subjecting virtually all forms of human interaction, planning, and even thought itself to comprehensive state examination.

Glenn Greenwald

#22. The Orwellian vision was about state-sponsored surveillance. Now it's not just the state, it's your nosy neighbor, your ex-spouse and people who want to spam you.

Howard Rheingold

#23. Orwell wasn't right about where society was in 1984. We haven't turned into that sort of surveillance society. But that may be, at least in small part, because of his book. The notion that ubiquitous surveillance and state manipulation of the media is evil is deeply engrained in us.

Ramez Naam

#24. You are lucky to feel sadness.

John O'Callaghan

#25. What state surveillance actually is is best understood by the NSA's own documents and own words, which I think as you know I happen to have a lot of.

Glenn Greenwald

#26. 'Happy Days' is the type of show that represents the best we can be. It's something warm, something tactile when life was good and life was simple.

Anson Williams

#27. Converting the Internet into a system of surveillance thus guts it of its core potential. Worse, it turns the Internet into a tool of repression, threatening to produce the most extreme and oppressive weapon of state intrusion human history has ever seen.

Glenn Greenwald

#28. Perhaps it takes a purer faith to praise God for unrealized blessings than for those we once enjoyed or those we enjoy now.

A.W. Tozer

#29. He's unreal. Even his flaws are great.

Bridie Hall

#30. We shouldn't have to be faithful loyalists of the powerful to feel safe from state surveillance. Nor should the price of immunity be refraining from controversial or provocative dissent.

Glenn Greenwald

#31. I gave everything I have to the poor and even sacrificed my body, I could boast about it;* but if I didn't love others, I would have gained nothing.

Anonymous

#32. I knew from my years of writing about NSA abuses that it can be hard to generate serious concern about secret state surveillance: invasion of privacy and abuse of power can be viewed as abstractions, ones that are difficult to get people to care about viscerally.

Glenn Greenwald

#33. Not enough people know or understand just how little freedom we have left.

Korban Blake

#34. Some say the economy means that you have to persuade people to invest in clothes - to buy less things but more expensive things. I disagree - invest in jewelry, or a house, maybe, but not in fashion.

Donatella Versace

#35. 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

#36. Your anger is self-damaging.

Sanchita Pandey

#37. Look to your heart
that flutters in and out like a moth.
God is not indifferent to your need.
You have a thousand prayers
but God has one.

Anne Sexton

#38. To turn his head and look at her would have been inconceivable folly. With hands locked together, invisible among the press of bodies, they stared steadily in front of them, and instead of the eyes of the girl, the eyes of the aged prisoner gazed mournfully at Winston out of nests of hair.

George Orwell

#39. Somewhere in that hour I lost all relation to a middle ground, and I didn't regain it for what became a very long time. In

Hope Edelman