Secret Police Quotes

• The major problem of our time is the decay in the belief in personal immortality, and it cannot be dealt with while the average human being is either drudging like an ox or shivering in fear of the secret police... How right [the working classes] are to realize that the belly comes before the soul, not in the scale of values but in point of time!

  George Orwell

  Average, Class, Soul

  George Orwell (2009). “Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays”, p.164, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Dictators must have enemies. They must have internal enemies to justify their secret police and external enemies to justify their military forces.

  Richard Perle

  Military, Police, Secret

  Debate with Howard Dean at Pacific University, February 17, 2005.

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• Let us hope our weapons are never needed - but do not forget what the common people of this nation knew when they demanded the Bill of Rights: An armed citizenry is the first defense, the best defense, and the final defense against tyranny.

  Edward Abbey

  Military, Gun, Rights

  "Abbey's Road". Book by Edward Abbey, 1979.

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• I cannot say that our country could have no secret police without becoming totalitarian, but I can say with great conviction that it cannot become totalitarian without a centralized national police.

  Robert H. Jackson

  Country, Government, Police

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• The real evil of the Russian communist state is not communism. It is the secret police and the concentration camp.

  John Boyd Orr

  Real, Evil, Police

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• Every nation-state tends towards the imperial - that is the point. Through banks, armies, secret police, propaganda, courts and jails, treaties, taxes, laws and orders, myths of civil obedience, assumptions of civic virtue at the top.

  Daniel Berrigan

  Army, Order, Law

  Daniel Berrigan (2009). “The Nightmare of God: The Book of Revelation”, p.22, Wipf and Stock Publishers

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• Anywhere, anytime ordinary people are given the chance to choose, the choice is the same: freedom, not tyranny; democracy, not dictatorship; the rule of law, not the rule of the secret police.

  Tony Blair

  Law, People, Choices

  Address to Congress Accepting Congressional Gold Medal, delivered 17 July 2003, Joint Session of Congress, Washington, D.C.

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• I want to make a picture about the Russian secret police - the GOP.

  Samuel Goldwyn

  Funny, Witty, Police

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• Our ultimate weapon is not our guns but our beliefs ... Ours are not Western values. They are the universal values of the human spirit and anywhere, any time, ordinary people are given the chance to choose, the choice is the same. Freedom not tyranny. Democracy not dictatorship. The rule of law not the rule of the secret police. The spread of freedom is the best security for the free. It is our last line of defence and our first line of attack.

  Tony Blair

  Gun, Law, Western Values

  Address to Congress Accepting Congressional Gold Medal, delivered 17 July 2003, Joint Session of Congress, Washington, D.C.

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• One of the consequences of the Iranian revolution has been an explosion of history. A country once known only from British consular reports and intrepid travelogues is now awash with historical documents, letters, diaries, grainy video, weblogs and secret police files of questionable authenticity.

  James Buchan

  Country, Police, Historical

  "Khomeini's Ghost" by James Buchan, www.theguardian.com. April 10, 2009.

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• The desire for freedom resides in every human heart. And that desire cannot be contained forever by prison walls, or martial laws, or secret police. Over time, and across the Earth, freedom will find a way.

  George W. Bush

  Wall, Heart, Law

  United Nations General Assembly Address, delivered 21 September 2004, New York, NY

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• Teller contended, not implausibly, that hydrogen bombs keep the peace, or at least prevent thermonuclear war, because the consequences of warfare between nuclear powers are now too dangerous. We haven't had a nuclear war yet, have we? But all such arguments assume that the nuclear-armed nations are and always will be, without exception, rational actors, and that bouts of anger and revenge and madness will never overtake their leaders (or military and secret police officers in charge of nuclear weapons). In the century of Hitler and Stalin, this seems ingenuous.

  Carl Sagan

  Revenge, Military, War

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• Socialism" is no more an evil word than "Christianity." Socialism no more prescribed Joseph Stalin and his secret police and shuttered churches than Christianity prescribed the Spanish Inquisition. Christianity and socialism alike, in fact, prescribe a society dedicated to the proposition that all men, women, and children are created equal and shall not starve.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Children, Men, Evil

  Kurt Vonnegut (2013). “If This Isn't Nice, What Is?: Advice for the Young”, p.64, RosettaBooks

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• Every nation-state tends towards the imperial - that is the point. Through banks, armies, secret police, propaganda, courts and jails, treaties, taxes, laws and orders, myths of civil obedience, assumptions of civic virtue at the top. Still it should be said of the political left, we expect something better. And correctly. We put more trust in those who show a measure of compassion, who denounce the hideous social arrangements that make war inevitable and human desire omnipresent; which fosters corporate selfishness, panders to appetites and disorder, waste the earth.

  Daniel Berrigan

  War, Army, Compassion

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• And if our goal as moral citizens is to make the world a better place, then there is only once choice: to pump as much oil as we possibly can out of Fort McMurray. Pump and steam and dig and drill and get that oil out of the sand in any and every way we can. Every drop of oil from Alberta is one less drop from some fascist theocracy, or some brutal warlord; one less cent into the treasuries of Russia's secret police and al-Qaeda's murderers.

  Ezra Levant

  Oil, Russia, Goal

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• "Godling? Demigod?" Lysis nearly howled. "You'd be beaten black and blue in Thebes, and staked out overnight for claims like that. In Sparta, the secret police would ambush you, violate you, skin you alive and use your skull for a drinking cup."

  Janet Morris

  God, Drinking, Blue

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• Some tell me Preach the pure gospel! This reminds me that the Communist secret police also told me to preach Christ, but not to mention communism. Is it really so, that those who are for what is called a pure gospel are inspired by the same spirit as those of the Communist secret police?

  Richard Wurmbrand

  Police, Secret, Spirit

  Richard Wurmbrand (2017). “Tortured for Christ: 50th Anniversary Edition”, p.74, David C Cook

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• Poland didn't experience a groundbreaking moment in 1989. We didn't storm the secret police building. The squads of secret police, with all their political baggage, remained unscathed.

  Wladyslaw Bartoszewski

  Squad, Political, Police

  Source: www.spiegel.de

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• Today anyone on the Internet can find out more about what you read, think, and earn than the secret police of Stalin or Hitler could have learned.

  Robert Scheer

  Thinking, Police, Secret

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• We're historians and above all want to write about what was. Our book doesn't deal with legacies. It also wasn't our goal to destroy a legend. We consider Walesa to be a national symbol. He led Solidarity and remains an icon. But he also worked with the secret police under the name Bolek. The truth isn't always simply black and white.

  Slawomir Cenckiewicz

  Book, Writing, Black And White

  Source: www.spiegel.de

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• We know the secret police's methods, and the way the archive and registry were run - that's how we know. We've also found evidence from the Bolek file cited in other files.

  Slawomir Cenckiewicz

  Running, Police, Secret

  Source: www.spiegel.de

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• I'm looking for a writer who doesn't know where the sentence is leading her; a writer who starts with her obsessions and whose heart is bursting with love, a writer sly enough to give the slip to her secret police, the ones who know her so well, the ones with the power to accuse and condemn in the blink of an eye. It's all right that she doesn't know what she's thinking until she writes it, as if the words already exist somewhere and draw her to them. She may not know how she got there, but she knows when she's arrived.

  Sy Safransky

  Writing, Heart, Eye

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• In the homes of many Western Christians, hours are sometimes spent listening to worldly music. In our homes loud music can also be heard, but it is only to cover the talk about the gospel and the underground work so that neighbors may not overhear it and inform the secret police. How underground Christians rejoice on those rare occasions when they meet a serious Christian from the West!

  Richard Wurmbrand

  Christian, Home, Police

  Richard Wurmbrand (2017). “Tortured for Christ: 50th Anniversary Edition”, p.96, David C Cook

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• The International Brigade was not formed to protect freedom and democracy. It was founded as a tool of of the Comintern, to promote the interests of the Soviet Union - and thereby of Joseph Stalin, the butcher of millions. It made political sense for the International Brigade to recruit non-communists - useful fools was what Lenin had called such people in an earlier manipulation of gullible decency - but of course most were then vetted by the NKVD, the Soviet Union's secret police.

  Kevin Myers

  War, People, Political

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