Yevgeny Yevtushenko Quotes

In the Soviet Union, you always have the feeling someone is watching you.

they had come to a time when no one dared speak his mind, when fierce, growling dogs roamed everywhere, and when you had to watch your comrades torn to pieces after confessing to shocking crimes.

There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live-did live, from habit that became instinct-in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.

We are under [government's] control, and if people don't realize that, they haven't looked around. And if they're not paranoid, they haven't thought about it.

We're being subject to incredible amounts of surveillance, the police are taking on draconian powers and violating our rights. I think this attempt to protect ourselves is ultimately going to founder because people don't like living inside prisons.

The Great Firewall of China and the unrestricted surveillance by the National Security Agency illustrate a tendency for the state to assert its interests at the expense of individuals.

I start every book with something that outrages me. I'm outraged by the FBI, the CIA, and computers that seem to have catalogued our lives. Power too often is accompanied by irresponsibility.

In 1933, the Gestapo was founded to become - to be a secret police agency to keep tabs on political opposition and so forth. Brand-new as of April 1933.

Governments regard their own citizens as their main enemy, and they have to be - protect themselves. That's why you have state secret laws. Citizens are not supposed to know what their government is doing to them.

My well-discussed 'paranoia' urges me to believe that some tiny segment of the NSA's parsing algorithm is finely tuned to my voice.

Local law enforcement agencies, national police authorities, and other state-operated surveillance has created a hostile environment for communities at the margins.

Now that we all live in a bad '70s sci-fi movie, I am made to understand the tyranny of the machines every minute of every day.

Were we ever to find ourselves living under a totalitarian regime, place no faith in the mercy of your fellow citizens.

The thing about the Russian secret police and the Soviet secret police is that one never leaves the secret police. Once a KGB man, always a KGB man.

Kindness towards strangers is rare in North Korea. There is a risk to helping others. The state made accusers and informers of us all.

Inside North Korea, we have many informants and spies watching everyone; they're paid by the government. Even a husband and wife can't trust each other.

North Koreans are tragically oppressed. Despite the risks to my personal safety, I feel a strong obligation to tell the world about the Orwellian nightmare that North Koreans face.

When 9/11 happened, it changed things overnight, giving the biggest shock treatment to individual agency. People in the U.S., the absolute stronghold of individualism and libertarianism, had to give up many cherished freedoms and privacies in exchange for the promise of public safety.

It's a social contract we make. We're willing to give up certain things. We give you the right to tax us. We give you the right to lock us up. We give you the right to put us on surveillance, search our homes, whatever and, in exchange, we get a functioning society that keeps us relatively safe, and that's the tradeoff we make.

Our rooms were bugged, our phones were tapped, and our lawyer's rooms were broken into and their files stolen. We finally had to hire armed guards with pistols to be able to maintain our records. It was hard to believe we weren't in Russia.

I think someone follows me. They do the most random stuff. I get a photo taken through a burger drive-through window and it's like, 'What?'. They always seem like they're six feet away. I don't understand. I'm walking around and I don't see anybody.

So efficient are the available instruments of slavery; fingerprints, lie detectors, brain washings, gas chambers; that we shiver at the thought of political change which might put these instruments in the hands of men of hate.

When Hale's hand disappeared inside his tuxedo jacket, Macey wasn't exactly sure what he'd find inside the pocket. It could have been another phone or a breath mint. Really, nothing would have surprised her. Well nothing except... "Is that an earbud?" she whispered. He smiled. "Are you on comms?" "Shhh," he told her softly.

You might be a redneck if when you leave your house, you are followed by federal agents of the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms, and the only thing you worry about is if you can lose them or not.

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.