Glenn Greenwald Quotes

For an entire populace, change, growth, and spontaneity were dangerous. Acting upon a personal desire, whispering a hidden longing, revealing your true feelings - all the human actions we think of as essential to a character - had be censored by the self lest they be punished by the state.

The Thought Police: To censor and protect.

Totalitarianism is not about some state that appears out of nowhere and suddenly is all-powerful. There can't be any such thing. Totalitarianism starts when the difference between your public life and your private life is effaced.

When truth is no longer free, freedom is no longer real: the truths of the police are the truths of today.

P.C. is just too Big Brother - telling me how I should act and feel.

As a reader, I've always been interested in dystopian novels like 'Nineteen Eighty-four'.

I don't see democracy getting better. I see democracy diminishing. More rules, more legislation. Eventually governments will see everything.

All that is needed to set us definitely on the road to a Fascist society is war. It will of course be a modified form of Fascism at first.

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.

'1984' is not a wonder tale. Not only could it happen, but it has happened, but under different names.

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

A functioning police state needs no police.

For much of the twentieth century, 1984 was a year that belonged to the future - a strange, gray future at that. Then it slid painlessly into the past, like any other year. Big Brother arrived and settled in, though not at all in the way George Orwell had imagined.

Big Brother is watching... look busy.

Absolute discretion is a ruthless master. It is more destructive of freedom than any of man's other inventions

The National Socialist Party will prevent in the future, by force if necessary, all meetings and lectures which are likely to exercise a depressing influence on the German state.

Political correctness is the natural continuum from the party line. What we are seeing once again is a self-appointed group of vigilantes imposing their views on others. It is a heritage of communism, but they don't seem to see this.

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

The fact that Facebook presents facial recognition programmes as a desirable development, well, that in itself is a decisive step toward fascism, as far as I'm concerned.

I've always been interested in those Orwellian dystopian novels, like 'Fahrenheit 451,' 'Brave New World,' and obviously Orwell's '1984.'

Oceania was at war with Eurasia; therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.

The government continues to erode our freedom.

I meant that the Chinese people are not aware of their own entrapment. They believe they live in a free society, but don't realize how much they are being monitored and controlled, how much the information they receive is restricted and warped, until they step out of line, that is, and feel the heavy hand of the state fall on them.

Big Brother doesn't like all these Little Brothers looking at it.

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