Robert H. Jackson Quotes

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.

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

Dictators must have enemies. They must have internal enemies to justify their secret police and external enemies to justify their military forces.

Even the most repressive regimes seek to maintain the fiction that they have the people’s interest at heart.

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

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

It's time to bury the unreal, failed 'realism' of those who have long thought that dictators brought stability.

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.

Excessive dealings with tyrants are not good for the security of free states.

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.

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.

A functioning police state needs no police.

Freedom only for the members of the government, only for the members of the Party - though they are quite numerous - is no freedom at all.

I'm tired of living in a police state.

Dictators are interesting, no?

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.

You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police. Yet in their hearts there is unspoken – unspeakable fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts!

Whenever you have an efficient government you have a dictatorship.

No socialist system can be formed without some form of political police – a Gestapo

A totalitarian state will harmonize in Spain the operation of all the capabilities and energy in the country

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.

if despotism were to be established amongst the democratic nations of our days it might assume a different character; it would be more extensive and more mild, it would degrade men without tormenting them.

A new fascism promises security from the terror of crime. All that is required is that we take away the criminals’ rights – which, of course, are our own. Out of our desperation and fear we begin to feel a sense of security from the new totalitarian state.

In every Revolution a dictator is needed to save the state by force, or censors to save it by virtue.