Wilfrid Sheed Quotes

We are being watched. It's now time for us to watch the watchers.

It's really weird watching the government watch me.

The term Big Brother is from George Orwell's book 1984 - where everyone's watched over by a network of cameras called Big Brother. I've never understood why Orwell chose that phrase for somebody watching you all the time. Isn't that more like Creepy Uncle?

I don't think there's much distinction between surveillance and media in general. Better media means better surveillance. Cams are everywhere.

Even if you’re not doing anything wrong, you’re still being watched and recorded.

It's creepy, knowing someone might be watching me. Why do they need that?

I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded. That is not something I am willing to support or live under.

There was a possibility I could have been under surveillance.

Everything I say and do, I assume that I am being spied on.

Homeland security intelligence done the wrong way will give us thought police.

Someone is always watching or listening.

Big Brother is home. He is installed in the item you just dragged home from the Apple store.

Society develops a type of self-censorship, with the knowledge that surveillance exists - a self-censorship that is even expressed when people communicate with each other privately.

If the FBI parks a van bristling with cameras outside your house, you are justified in closing your blinds.

What the government wants is something they never had before. They want total awareness. The question is, is that something we should be allowing?

Big Brother doesn't like all these Little Brothers looking at it.

We do so much better when television isn’t watching.

We've used the power that we have had to listen in to everybody so that we could better promote our agenda

It's really hard not to be paranoid when you find out that you've been spied on.

'1984,' one of the most important works ever written, helped us understand the Cold War. In '1984,' the dictatorship was always surveilling you. Now, young people want to be surveyed. They want people to know where they are at all times.

My well-discussed 'paranoia' urges me to believe that some tiny segment of the NSA's parsing algorithm is finely tuned to my voice.

Closed Circuit' came out of a general anxiety about surveillance. Government surveillance and private surveillance.

We've become the most eavesdropped, monitored, spied on, photographed population in human history, dwarfing anything that was done by the Stasi state and East Germany. And that's all been - you know, these are all the sacrifices that we supposedly have to make to make ourselves safe.

Our society is not one of spectacle but of surveillance.

Today in Germany, everyone is being watched--even the watchers.