Security State Quotes

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

The national security state has many unfair and cruel weapons in its arsenal, but that of junk science is one which can be fought and perhaps defeated. ~ Aldrich Ames

As it turns out, American-made technology had helped Mubarak and his security state collect, compile, and parse vast amounts of data about everyday citizens. ~ Rebecca MacKinnon

Miriam is upset. Her voice is stretched and I can't look at her. Perhaps they beat something out of her she didn't get back. ~ Anna Funder

Until the emergence of the New Left in the 1960s, in order to extend its political influence the Communist party had to establish front organizations or infiltrate and take over established political groups. Today such tactics are much less necessary, for Communists are welcome in the radical movement and can freely participate in its activities. More important, the goals of Old and New Left groups are largely identical. Both work for an end to American "interventionism" in the Third World and for dismantling of what they call the "national security state. ~ Guenter Lewy

Anticommunism in its modern form was invented by liberals like Harry Truman, the architect of the national security state. The proportion of the voting population that was not anticommunist in 1961 was miniscule. ~ Rick Perlstein

A huge national security state has developed in the United States since World War II. Its function is to buttress anticommunist, procapitalist governments and undermine and destroy popular movements whenever possible. ~ Michael Parenti

That the Bomb altered our subsequent history down to its deepest constitutional roots. It redefined the presidency, as in all respects America's "Commander in Chief" (a term that took on a new and unconstitutional meaning in this period). It fostered an anxiety of continuing crisis, so that society was pervasively militarized. It redefined the government as a National Security State, with an apparatus of secrecy and executive control. It redefined Congress, as an executor of the executive. And it redefined the Supreme Court, as a follower of the follower of the executive. Only one part of the government had the supreme power, the Bomb, and all else must defer to it, for the good of the nation, for the good of the world, for the custody of the future, in a world of perpetual emergency superseding ordinary constitutional restrictions. ~ Garry Wills

He [Edward Snowden] has been careful with his info, doling it out to responsible news organizations - The Post, the New York Times, the Guardian, etc. - and not tossing it up in the air, WikiLeaks style, and echoing the silly mantra "Information wants to be free." (No. Information, like most of us, wants a home in the Hamptons.)" – Richard Cohen, Washington Post (10/22/2013) ~ Richard Cohen

119When you bring together the national security state and the military-industrial complex, when you bring together the prison-industrial complex and all the profits that flow from it, when you bring together the corporate media multiplex that don't want to allow for serious dialogue ... and then, when you bring together the Wall Street oligarchs and the corporate plutocrats, and they tell any person or any group, 'If you speak the truth, we'll shoot you down like a dog and dehumanize you the way we did to dehumanize the brothers in Attica,' the only thing that will keep you going is you better have some love in your heart for the people. ~ Cornel West

Gore Vidal, Glenn Greenwald, Noam Chomsky, all these guys talk about how the United States became a national security state after World War II. I agree with that thesis. Essentially there's this bipartisan foreign policy elite who've been calling the shots for the last few decades and they're clearly still in control regardless of how clownish or absurd or stupid they demonstrate themselves to be. There's no shaking their orthodoxy. ~ Michael Hastings

We must pose the familiar question about how far our civil liberties have been eroded by the national security state ... Somehow it is always a choice between habeas corpus and hundreds of corpses. ~ Niall Ferguson

In 1945, at the beginning of the Cold War, our leaders led us astray. We need to think of the Cold War as an aberration, a wrong turn. As such, we need to go back to where we were in 1945 - before we took the road to a permanent war economy, a national security state and a foreign policy based on unilateralism and cowboy triumphalism. ~ Kai Bird

Security is not a license for people in authority to hide the tactics they would never openly admit to using. ~ Jack Campbell

We fail to move beyond what is safe, we abandon our dreams in favor of what is sure rather than strive for what is best for us. ~ Joan D. Chittister

Accountability is the essence of democracy. If people do not know what their government is doing, they cannot be truly self-governing. The national security state assumes the government secrets are too important to be shared, that only those in the know can see classified information, that only the president has all the facts, that we must simply trust that our rulers of acting in our interest. ~ Garry Wills

The bomb was 'born secret,' as Daniel Patrick Moynihan said. The atomic bomb marked a powerful turning point in America's stewardship of national security affairs. After its arrival, Garry Willis argues, 'the power of secrecy that enveloped the Bomb became a model for the planning or execution of Anything Important, as guarded by Important People.' But the first stop was a radical restructuring of the government itself, to account for the development and expansion of a nuclear arsenal requiring special means, staffs, oversight, and a stringent and novel regime of peacetime secrecy. The national security state was born. ~ Scott Horton

Should we wrap it all up and simply say that they arrested the innocent? But we omitted saying that the very concept of guilt had been repealed by the proletarian revolution and, at the beginning of the thirties, was defined as rightist opportunism! So we can't even discuss these out-of-date concepts, guilt and innocence. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition. ~ James Baldwin

I'm a true reactionary. Like all patricians, I'd like to restore the original republic, which we lost 40 years ago when Harry Truman imposed the national security state on us, which has kept us at war, hot or cold, for almost half a century, and it's got us $4 trillion into debt. ~ Gore Vidal

A big part of the story is American imperialism, and the flip side of that is the building up of the national security state here at home. ~ Peter Kuznick

Betrayal clearly has its own reward: the small deep human satisfaction of having one up on someone else. It is the psychology of the mistress, and this regime used it as fuel. ~ Anna Funder

Mythographer was suggested by the man who made my website, actually. I do write a lot about myth and I do feel it's a bit pompous to state it that way, but it does distinguish me from other writers. When it was first on the web, people began to use it in an ironical and satirical way. Now, however, people tend to use it straight. ~ Marina Warner

For 25 years, it has been my privilege to represent the city of San Francisco and the great state of California; to work to strengthen our vibrant middle class; to secure opportunity and equality. ~ Nancy Pelosi

A good deal is a state of mind. ~ Lee Iacocca

Others first. Whatever your corporate mission, paint a clear and compelling picture that others can understand and embrace. State your mission in terms that appeal to your team's best instincts. Persuade and empower as if you are leading and mentoring volunteers. ~ Tony Dungy

I don't think that Iran with a nuclear capability will be just the problem of the state of Israel. This is a matter that concerns the whole world. ~ Moshe Katsav

Israel is our friend, that we will assist in their security. ~ Barack Obama

The background reveals the true being and state of being of the man or thing. If I do not possess the background, I make the man transparent, the thing transparent. ~ Juan Ramon Jimenez

And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Thinking can be done best when you're in that state of mind where nothing can slip under the radar and destroy your concentration. ~ Auliq Ice

How stupid man is to be unable to restrain feelings in suffering the human lot! That was my state at that time. So I boiled with anger, sighed, wept, and was at my wits' end. I found no calmness, no capacity for deliberation. I carried my lacerated and bloody soul when it was unwilling to be carried by me. I found no place where I could put it down. There was no rest in pleasant groves, nor in games or songs, nor in sweet-scented places, nor in exquisite feasts, nor in the pleasures of the bedroom and bed, nor, finally, in books and poetry. ~ Augustine Of Hippo

To become aware of the subtlety of nature you need to be alert. The moment you become alert you become still ... thinking subsides. That is actually a higher state of consciousness than thinking. ~ Eckhart Tolle

What would you prefer? Life in a maximum-security prison or trapped in Jurassic Park?"
"Do I have a social standing in this prison?"
"No. You're just an average Joe."
"Then I guess I have to go with Jurassic Park."
"Why?"
"Well, I'll have constant fresh air, for a start, and also if I'm going to be anyone's prey, I'm going to be the prey of an animal that's acting out of instinct rather than psychopathy ... You?"
"If you're in Jurassic Park, I'm in Jurassic Park. ~ Samantha Young

The purpose of the whole (work) is to remove those who are living in this life from a state of wretchedness and lead them to the state of blessedness. ~ Dante Alighieri

There is something servile in the interpretation of sin as crime which infringes the will of God and calls for legal proceedings on the part of God. Sin is dividedness, a state of deficiency, incompleteness, dissociation, enslavement, hatred, but it is not disobedience and not formal violation of the will of God. ~ Nikolai Berdyaev

There is a massive apparatus within the United States government that with complete secrecy has been building this enormous structure that has only one goal, and that is to destroy privacy and anonymity, not just in the United States, but around the world. ~ Glenn Greenwald

Nothing has changed in Russia since Ivan the Terrible when it comes to the divide between the people and the state. The state demands a sacred willingness to make sacrifices from the people. ~ Vladimir Sorokin

Throughout my life, I have always supported the human being in his humanism and I have supported the oppressed. I think it is the person's right to live his freedom and it is her and his right to face the injustice imposed on each by revolting against it, using his practical, realistic and available means to end the oppressor's injustice toward him, whether it is an individual, a community, a nation, or a state; whether male or female. ~ Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah

You seem to be absolutely unaware of the phenomenon of marriage - which is destructive to both man and woman. Love is creative, marriage is destructive. But love is not dependable: this moment it may be there and the next moment gone. And man wants permanent things; he is obsessed with permanent things. He wants security, safety, he wants to cling. Hence love is not reliable, so he created marriage. ~ Rajneesh

I have an affection for a great city. I feel safe in the neighborhood of man, and enjoy the sweet security of the streets. ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

In the process of burning out these confusions, we discover enlightenment. If the process were otherwise, the awakened state of mind would be a product dependent upon cause and effect and therefore liable to dissolution. Anything which is created must, sooner or later, die. If enlightenment were created in such a way, there would always be a possibility of ego reasserting itself, causing a return to the confused state. Enlightenment is permanent because we have not produced it; we have merely discovered it. ~ Chogyam Trungpa

State governments generate less revenue in a recession. As state leaders struggle to make up for lost revenue, legislatures tend to cut funding for higher education. Colleges, in turn, answer these funding cuts with tuition hikes. ~ Arne Duncan

As you are all aware, in the course of life we experience many kinds of pain. Pains of the body and pains of the heart. I know i have experienced pain in many different forms, and I'm sure you have too. In most cases, though, im sure you've found it very difficult to convey the truth of that pain to another person: to explain it in words. People say that only they themselves can understand the pain they are feeling. But is it true? I for one do not believe that it is. If, before our eyes, we see someone who is truly suffering , we do sometimes feel his suffering and pain as our own. This is the power of empathy. Am I making myself clear?'

He broke off and looked around the room once again.

'The reason that people sing songs for other people is because they want to have the power to arouse empathy, to break free of the narrow shell of the self and share their pain and joy with others. This is not an easy thing to do, of course. And so tonight, as kind of experiment, I want you to experience a simpler, more physical kind of empathy. Lights please.'

Everyone in the place was hushed now, all eyes fixed on stage. Amid the silence, the man stared off into space, as if to insert a pause or to reach a state of mental concentration. Then, without a word, he held his hand over the lighted candle. Little by little, he brought the palm closer and closer to the flame. Someone in the audience made a sound like a sigh or a moan. You could see the tip of the ~ Haruki Murakami

Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence. ~ John Adams

I'm in my usual state up here in the commentary box: high tension, heart beating like a trip hammer, whatever that is. ~ Murray Walker

They knew where they were headed but they didn't know where they were going. Retina shrugged the thought. Roma complained about the possibility they were walking into a trap. After all, he was one of the scientists that decided Solstice's fate. Retina was adamant no one knew him. Lorenzo didn't care about anything much but reaching Zharfar after Retina surgically removed his Unicell Groper.
They were headed to Africa in what seemed a semi commercial private plane. Eight people including the pilots travelled. They weren't supposed to know any more particulars. But Lorenzo's watch placed the coordinates in both numbers and words. They were in West Africa, country Nigeria, state Osun, and township Isura. None of them had ever heard of it, the town, but they were there. And they had travelled for miles, over highly forested nonresidential areas and mountain peaks before they stopped.
Wherever they were going was greatly isolated, Roma thought. ~ Dew Platt

Has never liked the feeling of losing control. He's come to realize over the years that it's this very feeling that normal folk like and strive for, but as far as Ove is concerned only a complete bloody airhead could find loss of control a state worth aiming for. He wonders if he'll feel nauseated, if he'll feel pain ~ Fredrik Backman

So there clearly is a sense in which the Labour Party here, certainly at State level is reaching out and connecting with people and reflecting the aspirations and needs of, you know the mass of ordinary Australians. ~ Patricia Hewitt

One day I was meditating on a cliff overlooking the ocean in Southern California and I was absorbed in a state of high meditation. As I came out of the meditation and became aware of the sense world the world around me I knew that I had a new name. And the name, of course, was Rama. ~ Frederick Lenz

Power relations between men and women must change profoundly, men must be partners in the pursuit of gender equality, in their decision-making roles, as heads of state, CEOs, religious and cultural leaders, and as partners and parents. ~ Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka

If we restrict liberty to attain security we will lose them both. ~ Benjamin Franklin

Drunkenness was a communal and personal pleasure at once, a miserable state only to those not drinking. Sobriety to him was a cruel attack of conscience masking itself as awareness. If sober people were so aware, how come they only spoke truth when drunk? Give him the romance of a drunkard over the indignation of a teetotaler any day. ~ Marlon James

It is a State of Mind... and am the president ~ Ken Carlson N