"Any society that practises torture renders itself inherently unstable, although it may be propped up for a while by wealth. An accumulation of small cruelties leads to decay; moreover, those labelled as the Other become the Other, neither engaging with society nor sympathetic to it."
-- Athar Yawar, Healing in survivors of torture, 2004

"Mankind should be guaranteed the right not to hear and not to conform and the right to defense against psychological attack and against intervention in the form of perverted mass propaganda, totalitarian pressure, and mental torture. No compromise or appeasement is possible in dealing with such attitudes. We have to watch carefully lest our own mistakes in attacking personal freedom become grist for the totalitarian's mill."
-- Joost Meerloo, The Rape of the Mind, 1956

"It is the comparative feeling of security enjoyed by the citizens of democratic countries, the knowledge that when you talk politics with your friend there is no Gestapo ear glued to the keyhole, the belief that 'they' cannot punish you unless you have broken the law, the belief that the law is above the State."
-- George Orwell, Fascism and Democracy, 1941

"You must be equally prepared to fight in the open or fight under cover, to fight on sea, to fight on land, or to fight in the air. You shall wage your own war, you shall think your own thought."
-- Ragnar Redbeard, Might Is Right, 1896

"The second case of terrorization by a state is Hannah Arendt's example of the Nazi state's terrorization of the populations under its control (...) Force is now used, and beatings, torture, incarceration, and death are imposed, without the remotest regard to guilt or innocence as these are judicially conceived (let alone as they might be conceived under laws that were just), even without regard to people's political positions or convictions, without regard to anything they may do, say, or think in opposing or supporting the regime. Anything might count as an occasion for the unleashing of state-controlled force against a person - apparently innocuous actions, ascriptive characteristics, trivial grudges or incidents of offense. And the aim of this is not to cow people into doing any one set of things rather than another; but just to produce a human population that is cowed (tout court). The population is kept deliberately unclear - to say the least! - about what actions will and what actions will not attract punishment; and this is not because the regime has aims that it wants to keep secret from them, but because it wants to get them into the state that people get in when they have no idea from which direction and on what occasions the terrifying threat will come."
-- Jeremy Waldron, Torture, Terror and Trade-offs, 2010

"If, however, as in some totalitarian nations, domestic surveillance is sufficiently widespread, then a point could be reached in which the extent of collateral intrusion becomes so great that knowledge of even its possibility could have a chilling effect on public behavior, and thus on freedom of speech, for fear of being intercepted. Such mass surveillance would be unlawful for the United Kingdom."
-- David Omand, Principled Spying, 2018

"The human spirit glows from that small inner light of doubt whether we are right, while those who believe with complete certainty that they possess the right are dark inside and darken the world outside with cruelty, pain and injustice."
-- Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals, 1971

"Evil believes bad is okay, its actions are justified. Violence divorced from conscience, no matter what toll it takes or who it takes it upon. "
-- The Protégé, 2021