The most common characteristic of all police states is intimidation by surveillance. Citizens know they are being watched and overheard. Their mail is being examined. Their homes can be invaded.

When making public policy decisions about new technologies for the Government, I think one should ask oneself which technologies would best strengthen the hand of a police state. Then, do not allow the Government to deploy those technologies.

Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do.

Millions of people have to restore liberty and have to understand the danger and personal risk they face in a police state.

A functioning police state needs no police.

Unless we abandon elements which resemble a police state, we can’t meet the demands of being a modern society.

I know L.A. well, but it’s a police state.

I’d never been in a police state. I didn’t know what it was. I knew that it was, in the general way that people know that two and two is four, but it had no emotional value for me until I found myself in the middle of it.

When a leader has deployed a private army, that is one definition of a police state. Another is when the president, or a leader, has his own treasury.

When you have to pass a law to make a man let me have a house, or you have to pass a law to make a man let me go to school, or you have to pass a law to make a man let me walk down the street, you have to enforce that law and you’d have to be living actually in a police state. It would take a police state in this country.

If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.

Ten minutes in a video store should convince any impartial observer that we live in a police state of consciousness, far more pervasive than the Nazis.

It is foolish for people to think they can align themselves and be safe in a police state.

I think perhaps of all the things a police state can do to its citizens, distorting history is possibly the most pernicious.

There’s actually a lot of information on a lot of people and that is a major achievement of a police state.

People misunderstand what a police state is. It isn’t a country where the police strut around in jackboots; it’s a country where the police can do anything they like. Similarly, a security state is one in which the security establishment can do anything it likes.

As a nation, we have been responsible for the murder of literally hundreds of thousands of people at home and abroad by fighting a war that should never have been started and can be won, if at all, only by converting the United States into a police state.

If middle-class Americans do not feel threatened by the slow encroachment of the police state or the Patriot Act, it is because they live comfortably enough and exercise their liberties very lightly, never testing the boundaries. You never know you are in a prison unless you try the door.

California always struck me as a police state.

Since 9/11, the Bush administration has used that tragic event as a justification to rip up our constitution and our civil liberties. And I honestly believe that one or two 9/11s, and martial law will be declared in our country and we’re inching towards a police state.

I’m tired of living in a police state.

Only in a police state is the job of a policeman easy.

Americans have no idea why they have been at war in the Middle East, Asia and Africa for a decade. They don’t realize that their liberties have been supplanted by a Gestapo Police State. Few understand that hard economic times are here to stay.

Unless we abandon elements which resemble a police state, we can’t meet the demands of being a modern society.

Such an atmosphere is un-American, the most un-American thing we have to contend with today. It is the climate of a totalitarian country in which scientists are expected to change their theories to match changes in the police state’s propaganda line.

We will no longer be oppressed by the fascism called Christianity. We will no longer be oppressed by the mentality of the police state.

[Ayn] Rand accepts that when she supports military conscription, even indirectly. Also, she starts her politics from the premise that the State must have police power. She fails to take into account the inevitability that once you start with police power you’re going to have a police State.

The free state offers what a police state denies – the privacy of the home, the dignity and peace of mind of the individual.

I mean a real police state just to get a token recognition of a law. It take, it took, I think, 15,000 troops and 6 million dollars to put one negro in the University of Mississippi. That’s a police action, police state action.

A police state finds that it cannot command the grain to grow.

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.

Capital requires protection, as do the institutions through which it operates. As capital expands its operations, the state that is associated with its protection must develop its capacity for autocratic control. Thus, the “Free World” increasingly resembles a dreary string of heartless police states.

Not even the most heavily-armed police state can exert brute force to all of its citizens all of the time. Meme management is so much subtler; the rose-tinted refraction of perceived reality, the contagious fear of threatening alternatives.

A police state is a country run by criminals

Everywhere we look we see the encroaching shadow of the police state.

Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.

The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion.

I can see that in certain political situations you have to use force to overthrow police states.

Strength, the American way, is not manifested by threats of criminal prosecution or police state methods.
Leadership is not manifested by coercion, even against the resented. Greatness is not manifested by unlimited pragmatism, which places such a high premium on the end justifying any means and any methods.

All of the civil rights problems during the past years have created a situation where America right now is moving toward a police state. You can’t have anything otherwise. So that’s your supposition.