Trevor Paglen Quotes

Some people still believe you should just fall in line with what's going on - and that's scary. It makes a mockery of freedom of speech.

The greatest threat to freedom is the absence of criticism.

The difference between being out of step with a dictator and being out of step with the democratic majority is practically negligible. The important thing is to be in step.

You measure democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents, not the freedom it gives its assimilated conformists.

[…] the underlying problem is the soft progressive totalitarianism that seeks to compel submission to its creed. A powerful cultural establishment, now reinforced by political dominion in Washington, won’t tolerate deviance. Instead of learning to live at peace with the reality of pluralism, the essence of a successful democracy, it demands concordance with all of its ever-changing strictures. It ascribes dissent not to honest disagreement, differing experiences, diverse intellectual traditions or the basic human instinct for autonomy, but to malice and ignorance.

We should not be comfortable or content in a society where the only way to remain free of surveillance and repression is if we make ourselves as unthreatning, passive, and compliant as possible.

By all men bond to Nothing, Being slaves without a lord, By one blind idiot world obeyed, Too blind to be abhorred.

The oppression of any people for opinion's sake has rarely had any other effect than to fix those opinions deeper, and render them more important.

My books were attacked constantly by the Communist Party for not hewing to the Party line. I have never hewed to a Party line of any kind.

History is full of people who went to prison or were burned at the stake for proclaiming their ideas. Society has always defended itself.

The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it is conformity.

The price of seeking to force our beliefs on others is that someday they might force their beliefs on us.

P.C. is just too Big Brother - telling me how I should act and feel.

Will dissent be permitted? The answer to that question will determine whether the society is a free society or a fear society.

Censorship always defeats it own purpose, for it creates in the end the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion.

Has there ever been a society which has died of dissent? Several have died of conformity in our lifetime.

Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.

There's a tradition in the history of dissent in authoritarian countries of a certain kind of dissident, and their form of dissent is to live their lives as normally as possible.

Unanimity of opinion is characteristic of savages and civilization only advances as more and more people have the right to call wrong what the majority calls right..

A simple way to determine whether the right to dissent in a particular society is being upheld is to apply the town square test: Can a person walk into the middle of the town square and express his or her views without fear of arrest, imprisonment, or physical harm? If he can, then that person is living in a free society. If not, it's a fear society.

The strength of this nation is weakened more by those who suppress the freedom of others than by those who are allowed freely to think and act as their consciences dictate.

We have a free society, and the totalitarian states are dungeons. We have totally different methods of population control…. We can’t control people so we have to control what they think.

Suppressing ideas never makes them go away.

There is social intimidation by the self-appointed brigades of the thought police… they exist in every society, whether they are of the religious, nationalistic or atheistic variety. Dogmatists, who are convinced that they know better, that only the way they think is acceptable and who would deprive others of their right to hear differing and discordant voices.. They try to achieve this by either silencing the author or scaring away the public.

Heretics have been hated from the beginning of recorded time; they have been ostracized, exiled, tortured, maimed, and butchered; but it has generally proved impossible to smother them; and when it has not, the society that has succeeded has always declined.