Checkpoints Quotes

Liberty is lost through complacency and a subservient mindset. When we accept or even welcome automobile checkpoints, random searches, mandatory identification cards, and paramilitary police in our streets, we have lost a vital part of our American heritage. America was born of protest, revolution, and mistrust of government. Subservient societies neither maintain nor deserve freedom for long. ~ Ron Paul

She needed to confirm its presence. Like the keeper of the lighthouse and the prisoner, she regarded it as a mooring, a checkpoint, some stable visual object that assured her that the world was still there; that this was like and not a dream. That she was alive somewhere, inside, which she acknowledged to be true only because a thing she knew intimately was out there, outside of herself. ~ Toni Morrison

Christ at the Checkpoint is primarily a public relations scheme to dissuade American evangelicals from pro-Israel views. ~ Mark Tooley

On the other hand, all kinds of adventurous schemes to add security checkpoints to subway and bus systems have been circulating since the London attacks. This is nonsense. No one can guaranty 100 percent security. ~ Otto Schily

You can go and visit those places. Nothing there, nothing at all. There are Iraqi checkpoints. Everything is okay. ~ Mohammed Saeed Al-Sahaf

In my twenties I was in Austin, Texas, finishing up yet another degree. I'd always loved hiking and, sick of the sedentary life of academia, I'd joined the orienteering club at the university. The sport, which originated in Sweden, is a competition in which you use a special map and a compass to navigate through wilderness you've never seen before, stopping at checkpoints to have a control card physically or electronically stamped. The first competitor to hit the "double circle" - the end of the route on the orienteering map - is the winner. I ~ Jeffery Deaver

You're mother says you've never passed a mirror ou didn't like. It's true, in a way. It's not that you're vain; you're concerned. Mirrors are opportunities. They're random checkpoints throughout the day. ~ Adam Gallari

Map out lofty goals ... include reasonable checkpoints along the way ... refine, improve, and enhance your behavior in alignment with your goals ... . that is the dynamic of true leadership and the formula for success. ~ Steve Maraboli

To travel only blocks in his own homeland, a grandfather waits on the whim of a teenage soldier. More than an emergency is needed to get to a hospital; less than a crime earns a trip to jail. The lucky ones have a permit to leave their squalor to work in Israel's cities, but their luck runs out when security closes all checkpoints, paralysing an entire people. The indignities, dependence and anger are all too familiar. ~ Desmond Tutu

Hagen Koch: 'There was no other transport. People on bikes could evade checkpoints, they could have secret meetings ~ Anna Funder

Fallujah was a Guernica with no Picasso. A city of 300,000 was deprived of water, electricity, and food, emptied of most of its inhabitants who ended up parked in camps. Then came the methodical bombing and recapture of the city block by block. When soldiers occupied the hospital, The New York Times managed to justify this act on grounds that the hospital served as an enemy propaganda center by exaggerating the number of casualties. And by the way, just how many casualties were there? Nobody knows, there is no body count for Iraqis. When estimates are published, even by reputable scientific reviews, they are denounced as exaggerated. Finally, the inhabitants were allowed to return to their devastated city, by way of military checkpoints, and start to sift through the rubble, under the watchful eye of soldiers and biometric controls. ~ Jean Bricmont

Which brings me to one more thing about the Sheridan FCI [prison]. After you make it through the metal detector, you re stamped on the flesh above your right thumb with ink visible only in the black light of the prison checkpoints. Then you wait in a holding area like a farm animal before the next set of computer-locked double doors, and in this space, there are two things: a plaque celebrating the FCI Employee of the Month, and a full-length mirror with the message This is the image you will present today. Redressing, I always wondered whether this prop with its quasi motivational message was intended for us, the visitors of felons, or for would-be employees of the month. Perhaps both. ~ Jill Christman

These thieves defend themselves by saying, 'I was there all the time, and the officials missed me.' Favorite excuses for missing surveillance checkpoints: jacket covered the number took off the shirt with the number hidden in a crowd. ~ Joe Henderson

When people ask me about my story, I just go through the positive stuff: the tent-pole moments, the big landmark checkpoints. ~ Shia Labeouf

I like the idea of it. Just look at the world around you. Wars, terror, starvation, poverty, disease. Take the Middle East conflict, for example. An area on earth that contains so much hatred, so many frustrations, that a bomber is always lurking around the next corner, and where checkpoints and walls have become a permanent part of daily life. When I look at such a world from here in my little Danish ivory tower, it's a very appealing idea that there might exist at least--at the very least--36 righteous people on this earth. Small human pillars to ensure that we maintain a minimum of kindness and righteousness. ~ A.J. Kazinski

On September 16, in defiance of the cease-fire, Ariel Sharon's army
circled the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, where Fatima and
Falasteen slept defenselessly without Yousef. Israeli soldiers set up
checkpoints, barring the exit of refugees, and allowed their Lebanese
Phalange allies into the camp. Israeli soldiers, perched on rooftops,
watched through their binoculars during the day and at night lit the sky
with flares to guide the path of the Phalange, who went from shelter to
shelter in the refugee camps. Two days later, the first western
journalists entered the camp and bore witness. Robert Fisk wrote of it
in Pity the Nation:
They were everywhere, in the road, the laneways, in the
back yards and broken rooms, beneath crumpled masonry
and across the top of garbage tips. When we had seen a
hundred bodies, we stopped counting. Down every
alleyway, there were corpses - women, young men, babies
and grandparents - lying together in lazy and terrible
profusion where they had been knifed or machine-gunned to
death. Each corridor through the rubble produced more
bodies. The patients at the Palestinian hospital had
disappeared after gunmen ordered the doctors to leave.
Everywhere, we found signs of hastily dug mass graves.
Even while we were there, amid the evidence of such
savagery, we could see the Israelis watching us. From the
top of the tower block to the wes ~ Susan Abulhawa

The fuss made over the chickens at the checkpoints is not to be believed. Unlike me they had their own papers. ~ Elizabeth Wein

Life is way too short to get lost, so follow the script the way it comes and keep changing the checkpoints on every page. ~ Neetesh Dixit

The Americans set up impromptu checkpoints along the roads and erected stop signs in English - a language and script that not all Iraqis understood. Cars that failed to stop before the checkpoint were fired upon. I witnessed two entire families killed at the same checkpoint within twenty minutes of each other. ~ Lynsey Addario