Luis Fortuno Quotes

Totalitarianism is patriotism institutionalized.

China and the U.S. are two societies with very different attitudes towards opinion and criticism. In China, I am constantly under surveillance. Even my slightest, most innocuous move can - and often is - censored by Chinese authorities.

My mind is appalled at the thought of a political party having control of all the details that go to make up the sum total of our lives. Think of it for an instant, that the party in power shall have all authority to dictate the kind of books that shall be used in our schools and universities, government officials editing, printing, and circulating our literature, histories, magazines and press, to say nothing of the thousand and one activities of life that a people engage in, in a civilized society.

It's really weird watching the government watch me.

I'd known that the visit would be highly scripted and that genuine interactions with citizens wouldn't be possible, since it's illegal for them to speak with foreigners. Still, I'd thought I'd had a unique look at North Korea, only to discover I was wrong.

History is rife with examples of governments taking actions to 'protect' their citizens from harm by controlling access to information and inhibiting freedom of expression and other freedoms outlined in The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We must make sure, collectively, that the Internet avoids a similar fate.

Google has withdrawn from China, arguing that it is no longer willing to design its search engine to block information that the Chinese government does not wish its citizens to have. In liberal democracies around the world, this decision has generally been greeted with enthusiasm.

I know L.A. well, but it's a police state.

It is true that authoritarian governments increasingly see the Internet as a threat in part because they see the U.S. government behind the Internet.

In Iraq during the days of Saddam, I had a government minder who followed me everywhere, reported on my activities.

They have been talking about a dictatorship and they were right because there's a dictatorship and there's a government that has been fighting that dictatorship, the dictatorship of the media.

When I was under house arrest, it was the BBC that spoke to me - I listened.

When I was young, there was only one TV channel, sponsored by the government, and it only broadcast things like what the leader had for breakfast. There was no real media.

I don't want to live in a nanny state where people are telling me where I can go and what I can do.

In the Soviet Union it was illegal to take a photograph of a train station. Look what happened to them. They tried to classify everything.

The Chinese government sometimes shuts down the Internet and mobile services in specific areas where unrest occurs.

Google, Microsoft and Yahoo should be developing new technologies to bypass government sensors and barriers to the Internet; but instead, they agreed to guard the gates themselves.

There is a long tradition in China for writers and journalists to take pen names, partly as protection from retaliation by authorities. If Facebook requires the use of real names, that could potentially put Chinese citizens in danger.

It would be ideal if we could have an uncontrolled flow of information. But we realized you can't do that.

The Chinese government tried to keep a lid on the SARS crisis, but there were 160 million text messages in three days sent by Chinese citizens. These are early indications that it's going to be difficult for people who used to have control over the news to maintain that level of control.

Chinese citizens have never had the right to really express their opinions; in the constitution it says you can, but in the real world it is more dangerous. In the west people think it's a right they're born with. Here it's a right given by the government, and one that's not really practised.

There were no tourists. Beer was illegal. There was only government television and no television on Thursdays or in the summer.

The press doesn't stop publishing, by the way, in a fascist escalation; it simply watches what it says. That too can be an incremental process, and the pace at which the free press polices itself depends on how journalists are targeted.

What has the North to do with slavery? What have we to do with it, indeed! when it encircles us like the air we breathe -- as invisible but as ever near us -- when it makes our laws, controls our interests, appoints our rulers, sets a price upon our heads, demands the sacrifice of our free utterance, disfranchises in one half the States the citizens when the Constitution has made free every where--when it makes Religion its pander, and the Church its sanctuary!

The American people believe that we ought to control our government. On the other hand, we've seen government more and more controlling us