D. A. Carson Quotes

Surveillance breeds conformity.

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.

Any society where it's a crime or a hassle to be different is a society based on psychological fascism.

Extensive and organized power over large populations does not suffice to make a nation

While it [tolerance] is more or less quietly and constitutionally withdrawn from the opposition, it is made compulsory behavior with respect to established policies.

It is mediocrity which makes laws and sets mantraps and spring-guns in the realm of free song, saying thus far shalt thou go and no further.

Nothing has ever been more insupportable for a man and a human society than freedom. –The Grand Inquisitor

How did an allegedly free people spawn a vast, rampant cuttlefish of dominion with its tentacles in every orifice of the body politic?

Society indeed conspires to keep you ball and chained.

In the early 50s in the US, there was what was called McCarthyism and the only reason it succeeded was that there was no resistance to it. When they tried the same thing in the 60s it instantly collapsed because people simply laughed at it so they couldn't do it. Even a dictatorship can't do everything it wants. It's got to have some degree of popular support.

The left takes its vision seriously - more seriously than it takes the rights of other people. They want to be our shepherds. But that requires us to be sheep.

The average bloke . . . hates and fears all freedom, not only for others but for himself, and stamps it out wherever possible.

Under conditions of terror, most people will comply but some people will not.

Every member of the society spies on the rest, and it is his duty to inform against them. All are slaves and equal in their slavery... The great thing about it is equality... Slaves are bound to be equal.

A new type of superstition has got hold of people's minds, the worship of the state. People demand the exercise of the methods of coercion and compulsion, of violence and threat. Woe to anybody who does not bend his knee to the fashionable idols!

What matter the colour of the collar around a man's neck, if the chains linked to them were identical?

The worst thing is not that the world is unfree, but that people have unlearned their liberty.

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.

People are terrified to be set free - they hold on to their chains. They fight anyone who tries to break those chains. It's their security... How can they expect me or anyone else to set them free if they don't really want to be free?

America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set up by the non-dreamers.

The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.

If you put a chain around the neck of a slave, the other end fastens itself around your own.

We cannot let a minority of people hold a viewpoint that terrorizes the majority of people.

Democracy cannot long survive when the people permit their lives to be dominated - economically or politically - by a powerful few.

Collectivism is the ancient principle of savagery. ... Collectivism is not the 'New Order of Tomorrow.' It is the order of a very dark yesterday.