Bruce Schneier Quotes

The government continues to erode our freedom.

The stability and security of authoritarian regimes cannot create but terrorism and violence and destruction. Let us accept the choice of the people. Let us not pick and choose who we would like to rule their future.

When it comes to tyrants, dictators and terrorists, strength and the threat of force is the only language they understand.

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.

I'm tired of living in a police state.

I hate to say it but I was glad when they shot him. I don’t believe in terrorism or assassination but he could have become the American dictator.

The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and for government to gain ground.

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

Aggression is simply another name for government. Aggression, invasion, government, are interconvertible terms. The essence of government is control, or the attempt to control. He who attempts to control another is a governor, an aggressor, an invader; and the nature of such invasion is not changed, whether it is made by one man upon another man, after the manner of the ordinary criminal, or by one man upon all other men, after the manner of an absolute monarch, or by all other men upon one man, after the manner of a modern democracy.

I am a mortal enemy to arbitrary government and unlimited power. I am naturally very jealous for the rights and liberties of my country; and the least appearance of an encroachment on those invaluable privileges is apt to make my blood boil exceedingly.

Call me an alarmist, but we are witnessing the beginning of the most frightening period of government tyranny in our nation's history.

The most persistent threat to freedom, to the rights of Americans, is fear.

My great objection to this government is, that it does not leave us the means of defending our rights, or of waging war against tyrants.

The terrorists can kill the innocent, but they cannot stop the advance of freedom.

Freedom for the government is enslavement for the people. When the government is free the people are enslaved. When the government is contained then the people are free.

This excessive licence, which the anarchists think is the only true freedom, provides the stock, as it were, from which a tyrant grows.

The history of liberty is the history of limitations on the power of government, not the increase of it. When we resist, therefore, the concentration of power, we are resisting the processes of death, because concentration of power is what always precedes the destruction of human liberties.

Although we give lip service to the notion of freedom, we know the government is no longer the servant of the people but, at last has become the people's master. We have stood by like timid sheep while the wolf killed - first the weak, then the strays, then those on the outer edges of the flock, until at last the entire flock belonged to the wolf.

If all that Americans want is security, they can go to prison. They'll have enough to eat, a bed and a roof over their heads. But if an American wants to preserve his dignity and his equality as a human being, he must not bow his neck to any dictatorial government.

The essence of government is force, and most often that force is used to accomplish evil ends.

Only oppression should fear the full exercise of freedom.

Government is the natural enemy of freedom.

The worst law is better than bureaucratic tyranny.

Every nation that has ended in tyranny has come to that end by way of good order. It certainly does not follow from this that peoples should scorn public peace, but neither should they be satisfied with that and nothing more. A nation that asks nothing of government but the maintenance of order is already a slave in the depths of its heart; it is a slave of its well-being, ready for the man who will put it in chains.

Liberals love to say things like, "We're just asking everyone to pay their fair share." But government is not about asking. It is about telling. The difference is fundamental. It is the difference between making love and being raped, between working for a living and being a slave. The Internal Revenue service is not asking anybody to do anything. It confiscates your assets and puts you behind bars if you don't pay.