These surveillance quotes will inspire you. Surveillance is close watch kept over someone or something (as by a detective) or close observation, especially of a suspected spy or criminal.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging surveillance quotes, surveillance sayings, and surveillance proverbs.
Best Surveillance Quotes
- “In a consumer society, people wallow in things, fascinating, enjoyable things. If you define your value by the things you acquire and surround yourself with, being excluded is humiliating.” ~ Zygmunt Bauman
- “Arguing that you don’t care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.” ~ Edward Snowden
- “If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.” ~ George Orwell
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“Our society is not one of spectacle but of surveillance.” ~ Michel Foucault
- “If you’re doing nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide from the giant surveillance apparatus the government’s been hiding.” ~ Stephen Colbert
- “Total surveillance is increasingly the general condition of society as a whole.” ~ Michel Foucault
- “Today we are at a crossroads. The technology is available for two great options: The massive surveillance state, or the renewed freedom of a deeply-involved citizenry thinking independently and holding the government to the highest standards.” ~ Oliver DeMille
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“Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up-to-date complete files containing even the most personal information about the citizen.” ~ Zbigniew Brzezinski
- “Surveillance technologies now available – including the monitoring of virtually all digital information – have advanced to the point where much of the essential apparatus of a police state is already in place.” ~ Al Gore
- “Surveillance of power is one of the most important ways to ensure that power does not abuse its status. But, of course, power does not like to be watched.” ~ Bruce Schneier
- “Surveillance is the business model of the Internet.” ~ Bruce Schneier
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“Facebook is not your friend, it is a surveillance engine.” ~ Richard Stallman
- “If we don’t do anything, if we go along with the status quo, we are going to have a mass surveillance world.” ~ Edward Snowden
- “Everybody calls everybody a spy, secretly, in Russia, and everybody is under surveillance. You never feel safe.” ~ Agnes Smedley
- “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.” ~ Julian Assange
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“Corporate and government surveillance aren’t separate; they’re an alliance of interests.” ~ Bruce Schneier
- “In digital era, privacy must be a priority. Is it just me, or is secret blanket surveillance obscenely outrageous?” ~ Al Gore
- “History shows that the mere existence of a mass surveillance apparatus, regardless of how it is used, is in itself sufficient to stifle dissent. A citizenry that is aware of always being watched quickly becomes a compliant and fearful one.” ~ Glenn Greenwald
- “The many pro-surveillance advocates I have debated since Snowden blew the whistle have been quick to echo [Google CEO] Eric Schmidt’s view that privacy is for people who have something to hide. But none of them would willingly give me the passwords to their email accounts, or allow video cameras in their homes.” ~ Glenn Greenwald
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“The solution to government surveillance is to encrypt everything.” ~ Eric Schmidt
- “A crucial question is how to balance surveillance with privacy and keeping Americans safe.” ~ Dana Bash
- “Surveillance cameras might reduce crime – even though the evidence here is mixed – but no studies show that they result in greater happiness of everyone involved.” ~ Evgeny Morozov
- “Turn off your televisions. Ignore the Newt-Mitt-Rick- Barack reality show. It is as relevant to your life as the gossip on “Jersey Shore.” The real debate, the debate raised by the Occupy movement about inequality, corporate malfeasance, the destruction of the ecosystem, and the security and surveillance state, is the only debate that matters.” ~ Chris Hedges
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“I don’t think there’s much distinction between surveillance and media in general. Better media means better surveillance. Cams are everywhere.” ~ Bruce Sterling
- “The third person narrator, instead of being omniscient, is like a constantly running surveillance tape.” ~ Andrew Vachss
- “The National Surveillance State doesn’t want anyone to be able to communicate without the authorities being able to monitor that communication.” ~ Barry Eisler
- “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.” ~ Glenn Greenwald
- “Metadata equals surveillance; it’s that simple.” ~ Bruce Schneier
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“The idea of aerial military surveillance dates back to the Civil War, when both the Union and the Confederacy used hot-air balloons to spy on the other side, tracking troop movements and helping to direct artillery fire.” ~ Michael Hastings
- “I see battlefields that are under 24-hour real or near-real time surveillance of all types. I see battlefields on which we can destroy anything we can locate through instant communications and almost instantaneous application of highly lethal firepower.” ~ William Westmoreland
- “Initially I was very encouraged. Unfortunately, the mainstream media now seems far more interested in what I said when I was 17 or what my girlfriend looks like rather than, say, the largest program of suspicionless surveillance in human history.” ~ Edward Snowden
- “Everyone is now considered a potential terrorist, providing a rational for both the government and private corporations to spy on anybody, regardless of whether they have committed a crime. Surveillance is supplemented by a growing domestic army of baton-wielding police forces who are now being supplied with the latest military equipment.” ~ Henry Giroux
- “The framers of our Constitution understood the dangers of unbridled government surveillance. They knew that democracy could flourish only in spaces free from government snooping and interference, and they put restraints on government overreaching in the Fourth Amendment of the Bill of Rights. . . . These protections require, at a minimum, a neutral arbiter – a magistrate – standing between the government’s endless desire for information and the citizens’ desires for privacy.” ~ Elizabeth Holtzman
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“So we are being systematically trained to fear this false ‘rising crime’ tide. This is all part of a system to lock up more people, and impose more control and surveillance.” ~ Jerry Brown
- “No matter the specific techniques involved, historically mass surveillance has had several constant attributes. Initially, it is always the country’s dissidents and marginalized who bear the brunt of the surveillance, leading those who support the government or are merely apathetic to mistakenly believe they are immune. And history shows that the mere existence of a mass surveillance apparatus, regardless of how it is used, is in itself sufficient to stifle dissent. A citizenry that is aware of always being watched quickly becomes a compliant and fearful one.” ~ Glenn Greenwald
- “There are people who are always going to try to engage in activity that is illegal and they’re going to try to subvert surveillance. But everybody should not give up their liberties and rights to privacy because some people are going to [do that]. We shouldn’t stop or limit our basic liberties because some people are going to engage in criminal activities.” ~ Laura Poitras
- “Merging the ability to conduct surveillance that reveals every aspect of a person’s life with the ability to conjure up the legal authority to execute that surveillance, and finally, removing any accountable judicial oversight, creates the opportunity for unprecedented influence over our system of government.” ~ Ron Wyden
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“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.” ~ Edward Snowden
- “We all deserve credit for this new surveillance state that we live in because we the people voted for the Patriot Act. Democrats and Republicans alike….We voted for the people who voted for it, and then voted for the people who reauthorized it, then voted for the people who re-re-authorize d it.” ~ Stephen Colbert
- “The merging of the military-industrial complex, surveillance state and unbridled corporate power points to the need for strategies that address what is specific about the current warfare and surveillance state and the neoliberal project and how different interests, modes of power, social relations, public pedagogies and economic configurations come together to shape its politics.” ~ Henry Giroux
- “The technotronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values. Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up-to-date complete files containing even the most personal information about the citizen. These files will be subject to instantaneous retrieval by the authorities.” ~ Zbigniew Brzezinski
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“Selective ignorance, a cornerstone of child rearing. You don’t put kids under surveillance: it might frighten you. Parents should sit tall in the saddle and look upon their troops with a noble and benevolent and extremely nearsighted gaze.” ~ Garrison Keillor
- “All of the evidence highlights the implicit bargain that is offered to citizens: pose no challenge and you have nothing to worry about. Mind your own business, and support or at least tolerate what we do, and you’ll be fine. Put differently, you must refrain from provoking the authority that wields surveillance powers if you wish to be deemed free of wrongdoing. This is a deal that invites passivity, obedience, and conformity. The safest course, the way to ensure being “left alone,” is to remain quiet, unthreatening, and compliant.” ~ Glenn Greenwald
- “A regime which combines perpetual surveillance with total indulgence is hardly conducive to healthy development.” ~ P. D. James
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“It’s every little girl’s dream,” she said. “Interpol surveillance. And kittens.” ~ Ally Carter
- “Police in Washington D.C. are now using cameras to catch drivers who go through red lights. Many congressmen this week opposed the use of the red light cameras incorrectly assuming they were being used for surveillance at local brothels.” ~ Dennis Miller
- “Nobody is listening to your telephone calls.” ~ Barack Obama
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“While Congress saw some need to loosen the standard in the initial days of a war, it wanted the president to comply with FISA in carrying out surveillance in the United States.” ~ Jonathan Turley
- “If we had failed to pursue the facts as far as they led, we would have denied the public any knowledge of an unprecedented scheme of political surveillance and sabotage.” ~ Katharine Graham
- “Also, with information having just come out at the time about J. Edgar Hoover’s electronic surveillance of Dr. King, it gave greater weight to the statements of those persons who were alleging involvement of the FBI.” ~ Louis Stokes
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“The passed Pawn is a criminal, who should be kept under lock and key. Mild measures, such as police surveillance, are not sufficient” ~ Aron Nimzowitsch
- “The Sage of Toronto… spent several decades marveling at the numerous freedoms created by a “global village” instantly and effortlessly accessible to all. Villages, unlike towns, have always been ruled by conformism, isolation, petty surveillance, boredom and repetitive malicious gossip about the same families. Which is a precise enough description of the global spectacle’s present vulgarity.” ~ Guy Debord
- “Republicans don’t want to shrink government. They want more and more military, more and more surveillance. They’d like to have the government banning gay marriage and so forth.” ~ John Zerzan
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“One of the foremost activities of the NSA’s FAD, or Foreign Affairs Division, is to pressure or incentivize EU member states to change their laws to enable mass surveillance.” ~ Edward Snowden
- “These anti-public intellectuals are part of a disimagination machine that solidifies the power of the rich and the structures of the military-industrial-surveillance-academic complex by presenting the ideologies, institutions and relations of the powerful as commonsense.” ~ Henry Giroux
- “Slowly I began to realize that the bells and the confinement, the crazy sequences, the age-segregation, the lack of privacy, the constant surveillance, and all the rest of the national curriculum of schooling were designed exactly as if someone had set out to prevent children from learning how to think and act, to coax them into addiction and dependent behavior.” ~ John Taylor Gatto
- “As a result of the Stratfor hack, some of the dangers of the unregulated private intelligence industry are now known. It has been revealed through Wikileaks and other journalists around the world that Stratfor maintained a worldwide network of informants that they used to engage in intrusive and possibly illegal surveillance activities on behalf of large multinational corporations.” ~ Jeremy Hammond
- “Many of our ally states don’t have these constitutional protections – in the UK, in New Zealand, in Australia. They’ve lost the right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure without probable cause. All of those countries, in the wake of these surveillance revelations, rushed through laws that were basically ghostwritten by the National Security Agency to enable mass surveillance without court oversight, without all of the standard checks and balances that one would expect.” ~ Edward Snowden
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“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.” ~ Mohsin Hamid
- “Before Sept. 11, the idea that Americans would voluntarily agree to live their lives under the gaze of a network of biometric surveillance cameras, peering at them in government buildings, shopping malls, subways and stadiums, would have seemed unthinkable, a dystopian fantasy of a society that had surrendered privacy and anonymity.” ~ Jeffrey Rosen
- “The surveillance revelations are critically important because they revealed that our rights are being redefined in secret, by secret courts that were never intended to have that role – without the consent of the public, without even the awareness of the majority of our political representatives.” ~ Edward Snowden
- “It is perfectly clear that people, given no alternative, will choose tyranny over anarchy, because anarchy is the worst tyranny of all… The special nature of liberties is that they can be defended only as long as we still have them. So the very first signs of their erosion must be resisted, whether the issue be domestic surveillance by the Army, so-called preventive detention, or the freedom of corporate television, or that of a campus newspaper.” ~ Eric Sevareid
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“You have an always-expanding, omnipresent surveillance state that’s constantly chipping away at the liberties and freedoms of law-abiding Americans.” ~ Ron Wyden
- “From that point on, the extraordinary system of spies and informers which has played an important part in the political work of the French state into our own time took shape. (Sartine, who became lieutenant general de police in 1759, is supposed to have said to Louis XV, “Sire, when three people are chatting in the street one of them is surely my man.”) Eighteenth-century police manuals like those of Colquhoun in England or Lemaire in France are no less than general treatises on the government’s full repertoire of domestic regulation, coercion, and surveillance.” ~ Charles Tilly
- “The copyright industry has managed to kill civil liberties for their own children, ushering in a dystopian surveillance machine, merely to avoid taking responsibility for their own business failures. I lack words to quantify my contempt for these utter parasites.” ~ Rick Falkvinge
