Gerry Spence Quotes

The most persistent threat to freedom, to the rights of Americans, is fear.

It is poor civic hygiene to install technologies that could someday facilitate a police state.

Government, which does not and did not grant us our rights, must not now seek to deny them by using fear as its justification.

Nondemocratic regimes imperil the security of the world. They stay in power by controlling their populations. This control invariably requires an increasing amount of repression. To justify this repression and maintain internal stability, external enemies must be manufactured.

When the FBI adopts the tactics of the Soviet Union and Hitler's Gestapo, it's time for the Director no longer to be the Director.

The government assures the people that they are in danger from the invasion of another nation, or from foes in their midst, and that the only way to escape this danger is by the slavish obedience of the people to their government. This fact is seen most prominently during revolutions and dictatorships, but it exists always and everywhere that the power of the government exists.

I cannot say that our country could have no secret police without becoming totalitarian, but I can say with great conviction that it cannot become totalitarian without a centralized national police.

I don't know if I want to live in a country where lone wolf and random terror attacks are impossible 'cause that country would look more like North Korea than America.

Millions of people have to restore liberty and have to understand the danger and personal risk they face in a police state.

Call me an alarmist, but we are witnessing the beginning of the most frightening period of government tyranny in our nation's history.

Whenever justice is uncertain and police spying and terror are at work, human beings fall into isolation, which, of course, is the aim and purpose of the dictator state, since it is based on the greatest possible accumulation of depotentiated social units.

It is foolish for people to think they can align themselves and be safe in a police state.

Fascism is not defined by the number of its victims, but by the way it kills them.

Just the minute the FBI begins making recommendations on what should be done with its information, it becomes a Gestapo.

Setting people to spy on one another is not the way to protect freedom.

A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.

We decline the claim to power by parties which want to own their followers body and soul, and which want to put themselves over and above the whole nation.

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.

The Federal Government is exploiting public fear to redefine the relationship between the rulers and the American people.

You look at the greatest villains in human history, the fascists, the autocrats, they all wanted people to kneel before them because they don't love themselves enough.

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.

My optimism is not based primarily on the successful march of democracy in recent times but rather is based on the experience of having lived in a fear society and studied the mechanics of tyranny that sustain such a society.

The great strength of the totalitarian state is that it forces those who fear it to imitate it.

I'm tired of living in a police state.

In 1984, George Orwell wrote of a world where the only colour to be found was in the propaganda posters. Such is the case in North Korea. Images of Kim Il-sung are depicted in vivid colours. Rays of yellow and orange emanate from his face: he is the sun.