Newton N. Minow Quotes

Government should enforce rule of law. It should enforce contracts, it should protect people bodily from being attacked by criminals. And when the government does those things, it is facilitating liberty. When it goes beyond those things, it becomes destructive to both human happiness and human liberty.

The world will not accept dictatorship or domination.

Perhaps the fact that we have seen millions voting themselves into complete dependence on a tyrant has made our generation understand that to choose one's government is not necessarily to secure freedom.

If it is not totalitarian to arrest a man and detain him, when you cannot charge him with any offence against any written law --- if that is not what we have always cried out against in Fascist states -- then what is it?

They (who) seek to establish systems of government based on the regimentation of all human beings by a handful of individual rulers … call this a new order. It is not new and it is not order.

In all tyrannical governments the supreme magistracy, or the right both of making and of enforcing the laws, is vested in one and the same man, or one and the same body of men; and whenever these two powers are united together, there can be no public liberty.

Oppressive government is more terrible than tigers.

The tendency of all strong governments has always been to suppress liberty, partly in order to ease the processes of rule, partly from sheer disbelief in innovation.

Whenever you have an efficient government you have a dictatorship.

When the people are sheep, the government is always a wolf.

An oppressive government is worse than a man-eating tiger.

In Belarus, the government is a kind of presidential monarchy with no checks, no balances, and no rule of law.

Men do not make laws. They do but discover them.

A government of laws without men is as visionary as a government of men without laws.

Tyranny is the political corollary of socialism, as representative government is the political corollary of the market economy.

American laws don't work, but at least the laws of physics might work.

An oppressive government is more to be feared than a tiger.

Whatever crushes individuality is despotism, by whatever name it may be called and whether it professes to be enforcing the will of God or the injunctions of men.

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

In contrast, fear societies are societies in which dissent is banned.

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.

I left Beijing in the late 1980s to live in Hong Kong because, having been blacklisted by the government, I couldn't publish my works on the mainland.

The more laws that governments pass, the less individual freedom there is. Any student of history will tell you that. Totalitarian countries ban pretty much everything.

The totalitarian, to me, is the enemy - the one that's absolute, the one that wants control over the inside of your head, not just your actions and your taxes.

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