Harry Belafonte Quotes

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.

For many, the recent disclosure of massive warrantless surveillance programs of all citizens by the Obama administration has brought back memories of George Orwell's '1984.' Another Orwell book seems more apt as the White House and its allies try to contain the scandal: 'Animal Farm.'

Nothing whatever but the constitutional law, the political structure, of these United States protects any American from arbitrary seizure of his property and his person, from the Gestapo and the Storm Troops, from the concentration camp, the torture chamber, the revolver at the back of his neck in a cellar.

All of the civil rights problems during the past years have created a situation where America right now is moving toward a police state. You can't have anything otherwise. So that's your supposition.

We're being subject to incredible amounts of surveillance, the police are taking on draconian powers and violating our rights. I think this attempt to protect ourselves is ultimately going to founder because people don't like living inside prisons.

We have got to protect privacy rights. We have got to protect our God-given, constitutionally protected civil liberties, and we are not doing that in the federal government. The Department of Homeland Security, as well as the TSA, is a great culprit in being a Gestapo-type organization.

To know we are being spied on by our own government, and to have someone else's government collaborating on that, to know that data storage is so cheap your information can be kept for years and used to create any kind of story, to me that's a grave attack on human rights.

I said to myself, where are we living? In the United States of America where you're innocent until proven guilty, or Nazi Germany with the Gestapo calling?

When the FBI adopts the tactics of the Soviet Union and Hitler's Gestapo, it's time for the Director no longer to be the Director.

We [the FBI] are a fact-gathering organization only. We don't clear anybody. We don't condemn anybody..... The minute the FBI begins making recommendations on what should be done with its information, it becomes a Gestapo.

Civil Rights Program is a farce and a sham – an effort to set up a police state in the guise of liberty.

We should give full and efficient protection to the rights of all classes of citizens, whether native or naturalized, both at home and abroad.

Security is like liberty in that many are the crimes committed in its name.

I want to make it clear … that America is not interested in spying on ordinary citizens.

When a government forcibly holds enough people indefinitely without trial, it evokes the kinds of raids, detention, and abuses of power associated with authoritarian states - or darker periods in American history.

We have to recognise that rights are being violated. The United Nations actually filed a report that found that that was the case, that mass surveillance is a violation of rights.

In giving rights to others which belong to them, we give rights to ourselves and to our country

The domestic NSA-led Surveillance State which Frank Church so stridently warned about has obviously come to fruition. The way to avoid its grip is simply to acquiesce to the nation's most powerful factions, to obediently remain within the permitted boundaries of political discourse and activism. Accepting that bargain enables one to maintain the delusion of freedom - "he who does not move does not notice his chains," observed Rosa Luxemburg - but the true measure of political liberty is whether one is free to make a different choice.

The NSA is not looking through people's address books and Visa bills and violating the rights of average citizens. That's not what the NSA does.

stop spying on the lawful citizenry. Democracy and dossiers go ill together. It is all right for God but all wrong for the State to keep its eye on sparrows.

This is a time when the protections of Americans' liberties are directly at risk, as are the checks and balances that have served to constrain abuses of power for more than 200 years. The Supreme Court is relied upon by all of to us protect our fundamental rights.

Every one knows that the exercise of military power is forever dangerous to civil rights; and we have had recent instances of violences that have been offer'd to private subjects.

I believe strongly that we can protect our people without undermining our constitutional rights and I worry very, very much about the huge attacks on privacy that we have seen in recent years - both from the government and the private sector. I worry that we are moving toward an Orwellian society, and this is something I will oppose as vigorously as I can.

Obama has done things like Hitler did. Let me be very careful here. The National Socialists rounded people up and held them without trial, signed legislation that gave torture impunity, and spied on their citizens, just as Obama has. It isn't a question of what has been done that Hitler did. It's what does every dictator do, on the left or the right, that is being done here and now.

The callous use of general warrants and the disregard for the Bill of Rights must end. Forcing us to choose between our rights and our safety is a false choice and we are better than that as a nation and as a people.