Milan Kundera Quotes

No system of mass surveillance has existed in any society that we know of to this point that has not been abused.

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.'

The fact that Facebook presents facial recognition programmes as a desirable development, well, that in itself is a decisive step toward fascism, as far as I'm concerned.

I think mass surveillance is a bad idea because a surveillance society is one in which people understand that they are constantly monitored.

The whole Big Brother vision of the world is looming large.

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.

Our age has seen the birth of totalitarian systems and forms of tyranny which would not have been possible in the time before the technological leap forward.

We are rapidly entering the age of no privacy, where everyone is open to surveillance at all times; where there are no secrets from government.

Police states cannot endure under the advance of the computer because it increases the power of the people far faster than the powers of surveillance.

Even the most repressive regimes seek to maintain the fiction that they have the people’s interest at heart.

I wouldn't want to have the thought police going to people's homes, dictating what they teach their children. I don't want to be Big Brotherish. I would hate that.

In this the age of concern over privacy invasion and surveillance and manipulation, people will start to realize that there is no way to avoid being manipulated by other people, governments, marketers, and the like.

'1984' is terrifyingly relevant. It generates a political conversation, but it's an exciting piece of theatre. Every day, there are things to be spawned from Orwell's mind, whether it's in England or America, terrorist-related or government-related.

The government can spy on people using their mobile phones while they're with their wives and husbands.

If you are concerned you are the victim of illegal corporate surveillance, you should seek specialist - and independent - legal advice at once.

You've got the NSA doing all this collecting of material on all of its citizens - that's what the SS, the Gestapo, the Stasi, the KGB, and the NKVD did.

Seeing various aspects of the secret state and surveillance state echoes a long tradition in art of looking at the sublime.

Orwell had a very accurate foresight of today's dystopian world we live in. If only he was around to see it.

I don't know what fun newspapers and magazines derive from interfering in people's private lives.

If there's any credence to the guy who wrote 'Drones Over Blkyn' a year before drones were flying over Brooklyn, then listen to me: we're going to be in fascist police state.

We didn't have to use technology to build a surveillance state.

What makes 'The Handmaid's Tale' so terrifying is that everything that happens in it is plausible.

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.

Those are possibilities for technology, which don't tend to be used, because of the way power is concentrated. There are all kinds of possibilities, including for coercion. In China, technology is used to control and coerce. Here too, to an extent, but not to that extent.

To permit surveillance to take root on the Internet would mean subjecting virtually all forms of human interaction, planning, and even thought itself to comprehensive state examination.