Roger Waters Quotes

I think there are two ways in which people are controlled - first of all frighten people and secondly demoralize them.

Without communism ... our state lacks a Wizard of Oz to terrify all the people all the time. So the state looks inward, at the true enemy, who turns out to be - who else? the people of the United States.

A citizen walking through the airport today is bombarded with 1984-style propaganda messages that are designed to make us fear some amorphous threat and also be suspicious of others. The government designs these messages to make us feel dependent and heavily lorded over in every aspect of our lives. These messages are becoming ever more pervasive, hitting us even in grocery stores when we are shopping.

As long as enough people can be frightened, then all people can be ruled. That is how it works in a democratic system and mass fear becomes the ticket to destroy rights across the board.

It's easier to control people when they're afraid.

The people who have the power want you scared. They want you walking around paralyzed by the notion that you could die at any moment.

We have to be able track the ways in which fear, for instance, is monopolized by state and media institutions, ways in which fear is actually promoted and distributed as a way of bolstering the need for greater security and militarization.

So we are being systematically trained to fear this false 'rising crime' tide. This is all part of a system to lock up more people, and impose more control and surveillance.

Since the masses of the people are inconstant, full of unruly desires, passionate, and reckless of consequences, they must be filled with fears to keep them in order. The ancients did well, therefore, to invent gods, and the belief in punishment after death.

Even if they're functioning out of ignorance, they are still participating and must be suppressed. In China, even one million people can be considered a small sum.

In early times, it was easier to control a million people than to kill a million. Today, it is infinitely easier to to kill a million people than to control a million.

Good subjects must feel guilty. The guilt begins as a feeling of failure. The good autocrat provides many opportunities for failure in the populace.

I realize what you can do when you scare the population and how media contributes to that.

The people are drugged with religion; and that's why the elites - who understand that it is just a ritual, and understand the truth of it but won't teach the truth of it to awaken the masses of the people: so, the leaders live in luxury at the expense of the weak, at the expense of the poor.

If you're injecting fear into other people, then you're trying to kill their minds. You're trying to get them to stop thinking.

People only respond to fear.

In a dictatorship there is no choice, the elections are controlled, the police are the military, fear equals control, speech is suppressed, the economy is looted, the people are slaves.

Climate change is not about climate change. It's about the people in it getting rich off of an ever-expanding, growing, controlling government. It's all about expanding the government and government control over people. It's about creating victims. When you successfully turn somebody into a victim, you have automatically made them a dependent on you. You are essentially telling them they have lost the power necessary to solve their own problems. And you create within them a mentality that they can't overcome their own problem because they're victims.

Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear - kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor - with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant funds demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real.

There's a secret government out here. It's been functioning since the beginning of time, and their whole job is population control. A lot of it is racist, so their target black people and minorities. People need to watch out for that, pay attention to how they're tryin' to change laws, and they're tryin' to control the world. They don't want just America or Europe any more; they want the entire globe.

Do you doubt that the least effects of nature were not used as marks of the wrath of heaven? It was to the interest of pontiffs, priests, and augurs, as much as it is to the interest of lawyers and doctors that there should be lawsuits and sickness. No wonder they took care that the people should not grow slack in their religion.

We have to be able track the ways in which fear, for instance, is monopolised by state and media institutions, ways in which fear is actually promoted and distributed as a way of bolstering the need for greater security and militarisation.

When the imagination is continually led to the brink of vice by a system of terror and denunciations, people fling themselves over the precipice from the mere dread of falling.

Neutrality and boredom are the weapons of the state.

I think a lot of people vote in fear. People like Donald Trump are good at casting this shadow of fear over people, making them believe if they don't vote for him then the terrorists are going to get them or whatever. All his ways are to scare people to vote for him. It's so sad.