John Twelve Hawks: Trending quotes (page 2)

“Fear requires a desire to exist in the future.”

“Believing that the government knows what's best is an argument that barely merits a serious discussion. Any high school history student can come up with hundreds of examples of when a king, dictator, or elected official followed a destructive, foolish policy. Democracy doesn't protect our leaders from having a limited, parochial vision. A politician's true priority is career self-preservation.”

“Both dogs and humans know when we’ve been caged.”

“A Vast Machine watched and evaluated them, remembering their past actions and predicting their future behavior.”

“All of us fight a battle every day, but we just don’t know it. Love tries to defeat hatred. Bravery destroys fear.”

“One of the pleasures of writing novels is that my characters usually do something. But in real life we often stay locked in a situation that we know is painful or wrong.”

“Our sense of powerlessness—the belief that an ordinary person does not matter—has twisted our lips into a sneer.”

“The laws of mathematics are stronger than the laws of man.”

“Children defer to adults because they’re older, bigger and stronger. But it’s also because children believe that adults have reasons for what they do. There was nothing magical about the Pied Piper of Hamelin’s flute. The Piper acted like he knew where he was going and the children followed him into the dark mountains where they were never seen again.”

“You don't need to watch everyone if everyone believes they're being watched.”

“Many physicists these days sound like the Delphic oracle - with equations.”

“One cliché endlessly offered up by the people supporting government surveillance is that there needs to be a “trade-off” between security and privacy. But this is a trade that goes only one way. It’s clear that we’ve lost control over what personal information is public and what we prefer to keep private. The new reality is that they see us, but we can’t see them.”

“Lying, not love, is the fundamental indication of humanity.”

“True freedom is tolerant. It gives people the right to live and think in new ways.”

“Gradually, I realized that the surveillance cameras plus the email and cell phone monitoring was creating a Virtual Panopticon – a digital prison created and maintained by computer networks that enclosed all of us within its invisible walls.”

“Many of our leaders have gone past the old-fashioned politics of the democratic era and entered into the politics of fear. People running for national office no longer emphasize their views about the economy or social change. The leading political question of our time has become: who can ease our nightmares?”

“All the doctors that have examined you state that you appear to have no friends or family relationships and you are incapable of any sort of empathy. In short…you’re perfect for this job.”

“At the training camp, I was told that doors always open for a man wearing a hard hat and carrying a clipboard.”

“All the news stories were telling me to be frightened. All the commercials were telling me to buy things I didn´t need. The message was that people could only be passive victims or consumers.”