Dystopia Quotes

A twisted, pale figure writhing in agony, chest bare and hideous. Tight, rigid cords of sickly green veins webbed across the boy's body and limbs, like ropes under his skin. Purplish bruises covered the kid, red hives, bloody scratches. His bloodshot eyes bulged, darting back and forth. ~ James Dashner

That done, a second list began to sketch itself from memory. Food, water, containers, blankets...

I set three piles aside, starting with the blankets, then took what pillowcases I could find. They always made useful bags for carrying things when backpacks weren't available. One small pot for boiling, one small pan for cooking or additional self-defense. Knives, always good. One fork and a spoon for each of us. More than that, and they'd clatter inside our bags, keeping us from moving silently. No batteries. One flashlight that seemed to be working for now, even if the beam wasn't strong. The real coup would have been canned food or toilet paper, but those were truly one-in-a-million finds.

"Did you forget to tell us that you're taking us camping?" I'm all four roughing it as long as that entails air-conditioning and a nice view."

...

"Sorry," I muttered, forcing myself onto my feet. "Old habits. ~ Alexandra Bracken

That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn't even any rioting in the streets. People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There wasn't even an enemy you could put your finger on. ~ Margaret Atwood

It's more eerie to be alone in a city that's lit up and functioning than one that's a tomb. If everything were silent, one could almost pretend to be in nature. A forest. A meadow. Crickets and birdsong. But the corpse of civilization is as restless as the creatures that now roam the graveyards. ~ Isaac Marion

He thought of the Finishing School for Barbies where long-legged, high-breasted, stomachless girls went to get shaved clean, get their toenails painted pink, their nipples removed, and all body opening sewn shut, except for their mouths, which curved in perpetual smiles and led nowhere. ~ Kate Wilhelm

Even though we don't know which companies the NSA has compromised – or by what means – knowing that they could have compromised any of them is enough to make us mistrustful of all of them. This is going to make it hard for large companies like Google and Microsoft to get back the trust they lost. Even if they succeed in limiting government surveillance. Even if they succeed in improving their own internal security. The best they'll be able to say is: "We have secured ourselves from the NSA, except for the parts that we either don't know about or can't talk about. ~ Bruce Schneier

Through my fiction, I seek to highlight the social and cultural rules that we accept without question. Sometimes, without even noticing. Fiction offers a unique platform to do this, with dystopia at the fore. By exaggerating these ingrained rules, or by reversing them entirely, we can start to examine them. And question them. And challenge those that are harmful. ~ Angeline Trevena

I think.. I just want to look different.'
...
'Is that ridiculous?'

Priyanka came toward me, her expression contemplative.

'No, it's not. The only way to live is by following whatever message your heart is beating out for you.'

'Did you read that on a greeting card?' I asked.

'No, on some kind of medication ad,' she admitted, 'but it doesn't make it any less true.'

I turned back to the mirror and picked up the scissors again. ~ Alexandra Bracken

Moreover, people have become accustomed to reading to escape as opposed to reading to think. ~ Leigh M. Lane

By the end of Barber's talk, this event she's celebrating sounds like a product of the imagination of some master of speculative fiction like Philip K. Dick or Ray Bradbury - a mad dystopia in which feminist dreams have led to a forest full of separate clearings in which more and more women keep to smaller and smaller groups for fear of encountering difference. ~ Bruce Bawer

New York City is finished," he said. "They can't keep order there, and you can't have business without order. It'll take a hundred years to sort things out and get it all going again."
"What do you hear of the U.S. government? I said. "We don't have electricity an hour a month anymore and there's nothing on the air but the preachers anyway."
"Well, I hear that this Harvey Albright pretends to be running things out of Minneapolis now. It was Chicago, but that may have gone by the boards. Congress hasn't met since twelve twenty-one." Ricketts said, using a common shorthand for the destruction of Washington a few days before Christmas some years back. "We're still fighting skirmishes with Mexico. The Everglades are drowning. Trade is becoming next to impossible, from everything I can tell, and business here is drying up. It all seems like a bad dream. The future sure isn't what it used to be, is it?"
"We believe in the future, sir. Only it's not like the world we've left behind," Joseph said.
"How's that?"
"We're building our own New Jerusalem up the river. it's a world made by hand, now, one stone at a time, one board at a time, one hope at a time, one soul at a time. . . ~ James Howard Kunstler

a world where chocolate is entirely rare - or entirely mediocre - is a dystopia the likes of which we can scarcely conceive ["An Emotional History Of Chocolate," The Millions, January 5, 2015]. ~ Elizabeth Winkler

We're more alike than you realize. ~ S.L. Wallace

Level-1 or world space is an anthropomorphically scaled, predominantly vision-configured, massively multi-slotted reality system that is obsolescing very rapidly.

Garbage time is running out.

Can what is playing you make it to level-2? ~ Nick Land

I sink down into my body as into a swamp, fenland, where only I know the footing ... .
I'm a cloud, congealed around a central object, the shape of a pear, which is hard and more real than I am and glows red within its translucent wrapping. Inside it is a space, huge as the sky at night and dark and curved like that, though black-red rather than black. ~ Margaret Atwood

Emotion. It's a lethal weakness of our kind. A sickness that inhibits logic and eventually drives our minds toward the breaking point. It's our kryptonite – our fatal flaw and our saving grace.

After all, emotions make us who we are. They make us capable of love and compassion and selflessness, bring out the best in us.

At the same time, they ruin us. Make us feel hatred and pain and guilt. Cause our muscles to lock, our pulses to spike, our hearts to split in half.

These things called…feelings…could break every single one of us, if we let them. ~ Tiana Dalichov

In movies and in television the robots are always evil. I guess I am not into the whole brooding cyberpunk dystopia thing. ~ Daniel H. Wilson

He said it hit him travelling one time in the year or so before he met my mother. Whatever country of the world it was, the poor were starting to look alike, live alike, eat alike, and dress alike in the same kind of clothes all made in the same part of China. To him, it was a sign that the people had got severed from the land. ~ Marcel Theroux

The beauty of dystopia is that it lets us vicariously experience future worlds - but we still have the power to change our own. ~ Ally Condie

Dystopia is my playground. ~ Jean Nicole Rivers

For the first time in years, I could see the stars that Thurmond's monstrous lights had faded into nonexistence. They were so bright, so clear that they couldn't have been real. I didn't know what was more shocking–the endless stretch of road or the sky. Tears pricked at the back of my eyes. ~ Alexandra Bracken

...Liam had been in the driver's seat, singing along to Derek and the Dominos' "Layla" at the top of his lungs, so off-key that it had even Chubs laughing. Zu had been sitting right behind him, moving in time with the music, her entire body rocking out to the wailing electric guitar... ~ Alexandra Bracken

A defeat for humanity would be the failure to recognise the rights of two people who love each other.

A defeat for humanity is that people accept such hatred and discrimination into their hearts.

A defeat for humanity would be the failure of the church to recognise that nobody can control who a person loves.

A victory for humanity would be the dissolution of a theocratic dystopia that promotes anti-equality (aka "the Vatican") which has no place in a modern society. ~ Scott A. Butler

Vaughn is talking about the heat, and his voice is so excited that it breaks into whispers at times. He loves his madness the way a bird loves the sky. ~ Lauren DeStefano

At the entrance of the Führerbunker, a dandelion pushed through the crack between cobblestones. The cadet did not notice that he stepped on it as they entered the bunker.

A dark cloud of smoke rose from a burning ministry. Zeller fantasized that the filth that surrounded him was cleansed. He saw himself, a portly and tailored leader in a white uniform with gold epaulets, buttons, and stripes.

He imagined himself in an immaculate, white city in Antarctica. ~ Paul Majkut

I'm a writer; as soon as I imagine what would happen if I found the fountain of youth, it turns into a dystopia in my head. ~ Marie Brennan

As Vida always said, there are times you have to listen to your gut and tell common courtesy to fuck right off. ~ Alexandra Bracken

Be they pharaohs or freeholders, barons or farmers, landowners have been the most capable, most intrepid, and most assertive members of civilized society. ~ David Marusek

It was a room full of ghosts, arranged in readiness for days that would never happen. ~ Sharon Sant

Cities controlled by big companies are old hat in science fiction. My grandmother left a whole bookcase of old science fiction novels. The company-city subgenre always seemed to star a hero who outsmarted, overthrew, or escaped "the company." I've never seen one where the hero fought like hell to get taken in and underpaid by the company. In real life, that's the way it will be. That's the way it always is. ~ Octavia E. Butler

The world I remember was tired and racist and volatile as hell, ripe for a hostile takeover by a shit regime.
We were already divided.
The conquering was easy. ~ Tahereh Mafi

There was something called Christianity. ~ Aldous Huxley

The Suitors Ball is fast approaching and it's a nasty reminder that my suitor will be chosen shortly. I feel sorry for the poor unfortunate guy, whichever one of them it happens to be. ~ Siobhan Davis

The collective sign of relief heaved on V-J Day ought to have inspired Hollywood to release a flood of "happily ever after" films. But some victors didn't feel too good about their spoils. They'd seen too much by then. Too much warfare, too much poverty, too much greed, all in the service of rapacious progress. A bundle of unfinished business lingered from the Depression - nagging questions about ingrained venality, mean human nature, and the way unchecked urban growth threw society dangerously out of whack. Writers and directors responded by delivering gritty, bitter dramas that slapped our romantic illusions in the face and put the boot to the throat of the smug bourgeoisie. Still, plenty of us took it - and liked it. ~ Eddie Muller

We urgently need to do - and I mean actually do - something radical to avert a global catastrophe. But I don't think we will.
I think we're fucked. ~ Stephen Emmott

The paths people choose in life can lead to the creation or destruction of people, places, things, and relationships. The future is uncertain, but what is certain is there will be change. ~ Stephen Black

This is a dystopia, but also a post-apocalypse. The dystopia survived the apocalypse, nobody can get their head around it - too bad! You can do post-apocalypse things, survivalist stuff, rationing, killing, new tribalism, but you can also go the dystopia route, struggle against the decadent lords and masters, smash the seductive machine that's controlling your head. Just because you're crazy doesn't mean you're not also stupid, and neither precludes the possibility that you've got your boot on the neck of someone even worse off. ~ Jonathan Lethem

Because King Silas
always gets what he wants, even if he doesn't want
anything more than to fuck with you. ~ Quil Carter

When we talk about dystopias, especially in young adult fiction, a lot of them are essentially science fictional futures. They aren't necessarily tied to the traditional concept of dystopia. And so in that space, my impression is that kids love reading about weird, wild, adventurous places, and dystopia fits that bill. ~ Paolo Bacigalupi

For whom, it suddenly occured to him to wonder, was he writing this diary? For the future, for the unborn. ~ George Orwell

There is no sanctity. This is the downfall of innocence. ~ Nadege Richards

The scent of freshly laundered clothing that had been dried in the desert sun lingered around him. She breathed deeply, remembering how kind he had been to her that day, and she closed her eyes. The tip of his tongue brushed her mouth, and her lips parted slightly. She tilted her head back, relaxing against the strength of his arm as he cradled her. His other hand found her hip. Kisses, not so light now, trailed along her jaw before dipping lower. She sighed, the roughness of his unshaven cheek teasing the delicate skin of her throat, sparking a sense of restlessness in her that she did not know how to resolve. She wanted to touch him too, to kiss him in return, but she also wanted to stay just as she was because she liked what he did to her. ~ Paula Altenburg

Because of the foulness of her mother's emotional river, a current which ran swift, changing its path without warning ... ~ Tamara Rose Blodgett

nothing is more frightful than to see ignorance in action ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Elijah blinked in dazzling sunlight and took a deep breath. The sweet-pepper scent of meadow grass told him immediately where he was. Winded, he skidded to a halt as the portal spat him out. Above him stretched skies of cornflower blue, dotted with threadbare white clouds sailing over like cotton galleons on the summer breeze. ~ Sharon Sant

Perfect crime,' he said softly.
'Yes?'
'Persuade an innocent, idealistic young girl that the future of the human race depends on her sacrificing her own life. She will come into hospital as trustingly as a lamb to the slaughter. She will welcome the implantation of a baby that will kill her. She'll lie there while her brain is destroyed for nine whole months, and no police will arrest you, no court will judge you, you'll get away scot free. At the end of nine months she'll be taken off life support and she'll be completely dead. And no one will be blamed. ~ Jane Rogers

Wilder went into his sons' bedroom. Glad to see Wilder, they banged their empty feeding-bowls with their plastic machine-pistols. They were dressed in miniature paratroopers' camouflage suits and tin helmets
the wrong outfit, Wilder reflected, in light of what had been taking place in the high-rise. The correct combat costume was stockbrokers' pin-stripe, briefcase and homburg. ~ J.G. Ballard

Utopian speculations ... must come back into fashion. They are a way of affirming faith in the possibility of solving problems that seem at the moment insoluble. Today even the survival of humanity is a utopian hope. ~ Norman O. Brown

I swing my arms to loosen myself up. Place my fists on my hips. then drop them to my sides. Saliva's filling my mouth at a ridiculous rate and i feel vomit at the back of my throat. I swallow hard and open my lips so I can get the stupid line out and go hide in the woods and-that's when i start crying. ~ Suzanne Collins

Freedom breeds uncertainty; uncertainty invites chaos. ~ R.J. Leahy

I'm already under the covers when he comes in. I watch as he takes off his shirt and jeans, and climbs into bed beside me. On any other occasion, the sight and feel of his near naked body would send my blood pressure into orbit, but I'm so exhausted by the events of today that I'm incapable of feeling anything even close to desire. And he doesn't ask anything of me. ~ Siobhan Davis

Her life was not yet over, she decided. It just felt this way. ~ Hugh Howey

This is the legacy of a compassionate bunch. Our fate now rests on the whims of men. ~ Leot Felton

I don't understand', I say,'why they care what I think, as long as I'm acting how they want me to.'
'You're acting how they want you to now', he says,'but what happens when your Abnegation-wired brain tells you to do something else, something they don't want? ~ Veronica Roth

Looking out over all that land, it amazed me not that America had fallen but that it had ever existed at all. ~ Reed King

Everything was so much sharper without the Link fogging me
sights, sounds, smells. It was exhilarating and shocking and terrifying. I knew my emotions had grown too strong. They were dangerous to the Community. They were dangerous to me.
But still, I wanted color. I wanted to soar with happiness even if it meant dealing with the weight of fear and guilt, too. I wanted to live. And that meant that I couldn't give the glitching up. At least not yet. Just a little bit longer. ~ Heather Anastasiu

I plant a gentle parting kiss on his lips, our strategy is well and truly screwed at this stage anyway. We barely lasted a day. ~ Siobhan Davis

She held the woman's hand but the hand was now simply weight. She listened as the men returned north toward the gate from which they'd first entered. They passed close to her tent. It seemed an endless procession, thousands strong. She imagined them not as men, not even as human, but as a dark, daylong season: a primal winter. ~ Omar El Akkad

Have you thought about the evolutionary psychology of it? Men have evolved to be strong worker homestead-keepers, while women - with babies to protect from harm - have had to become aggressive and violent. The few partial patriarchies that have ever existed in human society have been very peaceful places. ~ Naomi Alderman

And of course she had studied the civilization that had immediately preceded her own - the civilization that had mistaken the functions of the system, and had used it for bringing people to things, instead of for bringing things to people. Those funny old days, when men went for change of air instead of changing the air in their rooms! ~ E. M. Forster

Every dystopia is masked by a utopia. ~ Mackenzie Draman

The tortures mankind devises for its amusement will surely render the devil redundant. ~ Reed King

Impossible is such a stupid word. ~ Tahereh Mafi

Our fight for justice will be equivalent to high school and college debate teams where it is all academic and sterile in the end. Whether or not truth wins will be irrelevant to the society and a dystopia is all we produce as a consequence. ~ L.B. Ó Ceallaigh

If we keep punishing people for what their parents or their ancestors have done, the world as a whole can never move forward. Society will never grow. ~ Jennifer Wilson

I can almost see the processes whirrling clunkily in his singularix, as his excited nervous system battled with his logic circuits. ~ Georgia Clark

What makes us the strongest tribe on the continent is the fact that a group that opposes these values
a group that would have mankind remain in the new dark ages
is permitted to grow, permitted to exist ... and, after it becomes a violent terrorist organization, is allowed to live on it own lands, taken out of the lands of those it has attacked and continues to attack!" He had to stop speaking then
the applause was louder than even his amplified voice. "They expect that fear will drive us to become like them ... closed-minded, blind, angry. Our society will remain open and free so long as I am standing upright," he continued, once the applause died down. ~ Lia Habel

The antagonists of finance's future, the diaboli ex machina, may have no face at all. ~ Usman W. Chohan

Games are never over because you think them so! Which is why I like you. Are you doing what you want to do...or are you simply another piece of a darkened puzzle? Your own actions predetermined by powers higher than yourself? ~ LaTorre Mays

Such is the control, and such the public mentality, enjoyed by the Swedish planners. The rulers of the Soviet Union, although favoured by despotic power, are not so fortunate. Obstructively resentful of officialdom, the Russian, in the words of the Spanish saying, has always known how orders are 'to be obeyed but not carried out'. To the Swede, that sort of compromise is downright immoral. His elected leaders have received those political blessings denied the autocrats in the Kremlin: compliant citizens and an unopposed bureaucracy. ~ Roland Huntford

If you listen closely you will hear the spirits sigh
a lesson lost on humans; an enchanting lullaby:
Mercy lies in nature's hands and bound to it we grow.
Of the earth we came to be and of the earth we'll go. ~ Nicoline Evans

They say that when people still rode on vehicles powered by oil, they could go anywhere they wanted. ~ Yoshiyuki Sadamoto

Everyone had grown used to giving orders to the pleasant-voiced feminine robots. Alexa, Siri, Sophia, Sage, do this for me. A perky 'okay', and your wish was her command. They'd all been doing it for years before women started realising the men in their lives had been conditioned to do the same to them. And by then it was too late. ~ Laura Lam

So many likes and retweets for having the "GUTS"
to say what every-
one thinks

ON
THE
FUCKING
INTER-
NET

(but never in the street). ~ Andy Carrington

I didn't really comprehend what was happening or how tonight had changed us and the course of our future, but I instinctively knew that things would never be the same again. Something had ended and something was definitely beginning, I just didn't have the knowledge base to know what. ~ J.M. Northup

(ghost of)ACHILLES: How can I force obedience on this? In other times I've used the fear of death to make a woman bow herself to me. If not the fear of her own death, then fear for someone else, a husband or a child. How can I bend this woman to my will?
(ghost of)POLYXENA: I think I will not bend.
IPHIGENIA: You see, it's as we've tried to tell you, Great Achilles. Women are no good to you dead. ~ Sheri S. Tepper

Every moment I've spent living, I've been waiting to die. I'm not afraid of death. Life is an inconvenience. Brings nothing but disappointment, pain, sadness, and injustice. Death is just a few seconds of physical pain before you are relieved of it all. It's always seemed like the better deal to me." -Billy Johns ~ Rosie Scott

Who did the council fight?"
"It split in two and fought itself."
"That's suicide!"
"No, ordinary behaviour. The efficient half eats the less efficient half and grows stronger. War is just a violent way of doing what half the people do calmly in peacetime: using the other half for food, heat, machinery and sexual pleasure. Man is the pie that bakes and eats himself, and the recipe is separation."
"I refuse to believe men kill each other just to make their enemies rich."
"How can men recognize their real enemies when their family, schools and work teach them to struggle with each other and to believe law and decency come from the teachers?"
"My son won't be taught that," said Lanark firmly.
"You have a son?"
"Not yet. ~ Alasdair Gray

He was digging in his garden--digging, too, in his own mind, laboriously turning up the substance of his thought. Death--and he drove in his spade once, and again, and yet again. And all our yesterdays have lighted fools they way to dusty death. A convincing thunder rumbled through the words. He lifted another spadeful of earth. Why had Linda died? Why had she been allowed to become gradually less than human and at last... He shuddered. A good kissing carrion. He planted his foot on his spade and stamped it fiercely into the tough ground. As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kills us for their sport. Thunder again; words that proclaimed themselves true--truer somehow than truth itself. And yet that same Gloucester had called them ever-gentle gods. Besides, thy best of rest is sleep, and that thou oft provok'st; yet grossly fear'st thy death which is no more. No more than sleep. Sleep. Perchance to dream. His spade struck against a stone; he stooped to pick it up. For in that sleep of death, what dreams...? ~ Aldous Huxley

As I ran a few blades of grass between my fingers, enjoying the breeze as it caressed my face, I contemplated the cycle of life. As this year would host the long anticipated arrival of the Mayan Doomsday, marking the end of their long count calendar, I wasn't alone in my ponderings. The whole world was focused on the potential that we would be the last generation; the witnesses of the world's end. ~ J.M. Northup

We imagine all these postapocalyptic, class-stratified, new-world-order techno-futures. But actually the real world, the world we live in, this is the dystopia. ~ Elan Mastai

Homo sapiens! The name itself was an irony. They had not been wise at all, but incredibly stupid. Lords of the Earth with their great gray brains, their thinking minds had placed them above all other forms of life. Yet it had not been thought that compelled them to act, but emotion. From the dawn of their evolution they had killed, and conquered, and subdued. They had committed atrocities on others of their kind, ravaged the land, polluted and destroyed, left millions to starve in Third World countries, and finished it all with a nuclear holocaust. The mutants were right. Intelligent creatures did not commit genocide, or murder the environment on which they were dependent. ~ Louise Lawrence

The greatest guilt of today is that of people who accept collectivism by moral default; the people who seek protection from the necessity of taking a stand, by refusing to admit to themselves the nature of that which they are accepting; the people who support plans specifically designed to achieve serfdom, but hide behind the empty assertion that they are lovers of freedom, with no concrete meaning attached to the word; the people who believe that the content of ideas need not be examined, that principles need not be defined, and that facts can be eliminated by keeping one's eyes shut. They expect, when they find themselves in a world of bloody ruins and concentration camps, to escape moral responsibility by wailing: But I didn't mean this! ~ Ayn Rand

Simon hated her for that. Perhaps it was automatic. Her appearance alone made her different from him, and human beings had always feared and hated anyone who was different. Two thousand years of history saw it being repeated over and over, the perpetual struggle of one race, or tribe, or creed, against another ... each one thinking they were right, superior, morally justified, or chosen by God. Simon saw himself as normal, Laura as abnormal. ~ Louise Lawrence

Leyner's fiction is, in this regard, an eloquent reply to Gilder's prediction that our TV-culture problems can be resolved by the dismantling of images into discrete chunks we can recombine as we fancy. Leyner's world is a Gilder-esque dystopia. The passivity and schizoid decay still endure for Leyner in his characters' reception of images and waves of data. The ability to combine them only adds a layer of disorientation: when all experience can be deconstructed and reconfigured, there become simply too many choices. And in the absence of any credible, noncommercial guides for living, the freedom to choose is about as "liberating" as a bad acid trip: each quantum is as good as the next, and the only standard of an assembly's quality is its weirdness, incongruity, its ability to stand out from a crowd of other image-constructs and wow some Audience. ~ David Foster Wallace

Oh, I wonder if there's another way. ~ S.L. Wallace

This virus will leave us entirely newborn people. We will all be different, none of us will ever be the same again. We will have deeper roots, be made of denser soil, and our eyes will have seen things. ~ C. JoyBell C.

Hunter and hunted. There are so many ways in which a man can destroy a woman." Her handmaid sighed. "When it comes to matters of the heart, immortals know nothing. ~ Paula Altenburg

Oh that voice, so sweet. Rich, like the taste of vanilla ice cream, vowels like flute music, warm caramel consonants. She could float in that voice forever and not miss a thing. ~ Suki Michelle

Anything but chicken, and some honesty on the side, please. ~ S.L. Wallace

I catch movement from the corner of my eye. A tell slender boy stands near us, just a few feet away. Adrenaline bangs through my system. I shove Abel behind me and whip my knife from where I'd hidden it in my boot. Who the hell are you? ~ Georgia Clark

I think that sometimes the only real thing is now. ~ Suzanne Young

dystopia, a reliably clean, well-lighted place. ~ Kate Atkinson

Perhaps every society is a utopia when you fail to peel up all the layers and look at what's underneath ~ Kameron Hurley

All utopias are dystopias. The term "dystopia" was coined by fools that believed a "utopia" can be functional. ~ A.E. Samaan

The more the media peddled fear, the more the people lost the ability to believe in one another. For every new ill that befell them, the media created an explanation, and the explanation always had a face and a name. The people came to fear even their closest neighbors. At the level of the individual, the community, and the nation, people sought signs of others' ill intentions; and everywhere they looked, they found them, for this is what looking does. ~ Bernard Beckett

His style as a writer places him in the category of the immortals, and his courage as a critic outlives the bitter battles in which he engaged. As a result, we use the word 'Orwellian' in two senses: The first describes a nightmare state, a dystopia of untrammelled power; the second describes the human qualities that are always ranged in resistance to such regimes, and that may be more potent and durable than we sometimes dare to think. ~ Christopher Hitchens

The OCSD has been chipping away at our freedoms for most of our lives, all in the name of safety. But over-controlling something doesn't necessarily make it safer or better, even though people don't realize it. They believe the OCSD protects them and has their best interests at heart, but most of the OCSD's policies do more harm than good. ~ Tracy Lawson

I put it to the great man [Hitchcock], the key to fictitious terror is partition or containment: so long as the Bates Motel is sealed off from our world, we want to peer in, like at a scorpion enclosure. But a film that shows the world is a Bates Motel, well, that's ... the stuff of Buchloe, dystopia, depression. We'll dip our toes in a predatory, amoral, godless unive3rse, but only our toes. ~ David Mitchell

CCTV is seen either as a symbol of Orwellian dystopia or a technology that will lead to crime-free streets and civil behaviour. While arguments continue, there is very little solid data in the public domain about the costs, quantity and effectiveness of surveillance. ~ Heather Brooke