Jean Dubuffet Quotes

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

A functioning police state needs no police.

If you're tempted to believe with Governor Cuomo that government is just like Mom and Pop rather than Big Brother, just ask yourself one question: When was the last time all the IRS wanted from you was a hug and a kiss.

One thing about a police state, you can always find the police.

[Ayn] Rand accepts that when she supports military conscription, even indirectly. Also, she starts her politics from the premise that the State must have police power. She fails to take into account the inevitability that once you start with police power you're going to have a police State.

The State has always one purpose: to limit, control, subordinate the individual and subject him to the general purpose Through its censorship, its supervision, and its police the State tries to obstruct all free activity and sees this repression as its duty, because the instinct of self-preservation demands it. The State does not permit me to use my thoughts to their full value and communicate them to other men unless they are its own Otherwise it shuts me up.

To be governed is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-ridden, regulated, penned up, indoctrinated, preached at, checked, appraised, seized, censured, commanded, by beings who have neither title, nor knowledge, nor virtue. To be governed is to have every operation, every transaction, every movement noted, registered, counted, rated, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, refused, authorized, indorsed, admonished, prevented, reformed, redressed, corrected.

POLICE, n. An armed force for protection and participation.

A policemans job is only easy in a police state.

The essential feature of government is the enforcement of its decrees by beating, killing, and imprisoning.

The state, the state apparatus, is not an abstraction.

Even when the State does good things, it finally rests on a club, a gun, or a prison, for its power to carry them through.

To be governed is to be watched over, inspected, spied on, directed, legislated at, regulated, docketed, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, assessed, weighed, censored, ordered about, by men who have neither the right, nor the knowledge, nor the virtue. ...

Government is the assumption of authority over a given area and all within it, exercised generally for the double purpose of more complete oppression of its subjects and extension of its boundaries.

The most common characteristic of all police states is intimidation by surveillance. Citizens know they are being watched and overheard. Their mail is being examined. Their homes can be invaded.

Whoever says State necessarily says domination, and, consequently, slavery; a State without slavery, open or concealed, is inconceivable: that is why we are enemies of the State.

You get the same order of criminality from any State to which you give power to exercise it; and whatever power you give the State to do things for you carries with it the equivalent power to do things to you.

Freedoms and apprenticeships are likewise expedients of police,not of that wholesome branch of police, whose object is the maintenance of the public and private security, and which is neither costly nor vexatious; but of that sort of police which bad governments employ to preserve or extend their personal authority at any expense.

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.

Government is an apparatus of compulsion and coercion.

Trust is fine, but control is better.

The true, unacknowledged purpose of capital punishment is to inspire fear and awe -- fear and awe of the State.

who are the brain police?

The gaze that sees is the gaze that dominates.

A lot of what is called 'public service' consists of making hoops for other people to jump through. It is a great career for those who cannot feel fulfilled unless they are telling other people what to do.