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It is poor civic hygiene to install technologies that could someday facilitate a police state.
--
Secrets and Lies (2000), p. 53

 

Bruce Schneier

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How, precisely, do you define a police state? Is it the number of police per capita? How about the number of prisons? Police use of machine guns or armored personnel carriers? The use of the police or the military to put down strikes, or to otherwise "keep the trains running on time," as was Mussolini's specialty? Perhaps it's the use of the police or the military to halt civil unrest. Or maybe the widespread use of curfews. Arbitrary confiscation of private property. How about this: could a police state be defined, as in Nazi Germany, by the use of force to segregate members of a specific race into concentration camps or prisons?

 

Derrick Jensen

 

Americans don't like plain talk anymore. Nowadays they like fat talk. Show them a lean, plain word that cuts to the bone and watch them lard it with thick greasy syllables front and back until it wheezes and gasps for breath as it comes lumbering down upon some poor threadbare sentence like a sack of iron on a swayback horse.
"Facilitate" is typical of the case. A generation ago only sissies and bureaucrats would have said "facilitate" in public. Nowadays we are a nation of "facilitate" utterers.
"Facilitate" is nothing more than a gout-ridden, overstuffed "ease." Why has "ease" fallen into disuse among us? It is a lovely little bright snake of a word which comes hissing quietly off the tongue and carries us on, without fuss and French horns, to the object which is being eased.
This is English at its very best. Easing is not one of the great events of life; it does not call for Beethoven; it is not an idea to get drunk on, to wallow in, to engage in multiple oleaginous syllabification until it becomes a pompous ass of a word like "facilitate."

 

Russell Baker

 

Even if you want no state, or a minimal state, then you have to argue point by point. Especially since the minimalists want to keep the economic and police system that keeps them privileged. That's libertarians for you — anarchists who want police protection from their slaves. No! If you want to make the minimum-state case, you have to argue it from the ground up.

 

Kim Stanley Robinson

 

We must see that there is civic honesty, civic cleanliness, civic good sense in our home administration of city, State, and nation. We must strive for honesty in office, for honesty toward the creditors of the nation and of the individual; for the widest freedom of individual initiative where possible, and for the wisest control of individual initiative where it is hostile to the welfare of the many. But because we set our own household in order we are not thereby excused from playing our part in the great affairs of the world. A man's first duty is to his own home, but he is not thereby excused from doing his duty to the State; for if he fails in this second duty it is under the penalty of ceasing to be a freeman. In the same way, while a nation's first duty is within its own borders, it is not thereby absolved from facing its duties in the world as a whole; and if it refuses to do so, it merely forfeits its right to struggle for a place among the peoples that shape the destiny of mankind.

 

Theodore Roosevelt

 

Aaron Russo: Do you think America is going deeper and deeper into becoming a police state?
Ron Paul: Yeah, I think we're moving in that direction, because there's not much we can do without permission. The absence of a police state is that people are free, and if you don't commit crimes you can do what you want. But today, you can't open up a business, you can't develop land, you can't go to the bank, you can't go to the doctor without the government knowing what you're doing. They talk about medical privacy, that's gone. Financial privacy, that's gone. The right to own property, that's essentially gone. So you have to get permission from the government for almost everything. And if that is the definition of a police state, that you can't do anything unless the government gives you permission, we're well on our way. This is something that people eventually, I hope, will get sick and tired of, and say enough is enough.

 

Ron Paul