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“These programs were never about terrorism: they're about economic spying, social control, and diplomatic manipulation. They're about power.”
― Edward Snowden

“…jingoism, racism, fear, religious fundamentalism: these are the ways of appealing to people if you’re trying to organize a mass base of support for policies that are really intended to crush them.”
― Noam Chomsky, Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky

“Spray a bug with a toxin and it dies; spray a man, spray his brain, and he becomes an insect that clacks and vibrates about in a closed circle forever. A reflex machine, like an ant. Repeating his last instruction.”
― Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly

“Maybe the concept of friendship is already too colonized by liberalism and capitalism. Under neoliberalism, friendship is a banal affair of private preferences: we hang out, we share hobbies, we make small talk. We become friends with those who are already like us, and we keep each other comfortable rather than becoming different and more capable together. The algorithms of Facebook and other social networks guide us towards the refinement of our profiles, reducing friendship to the click of a button. This neoliberal friend is the alternative to hetero- and homonormative coupling: "just friends" implies a much weaker and insignificant bond than a lover could ever be. Under neoliberal friendship, we don't have each other's backs, and our lives
aren't tangled up together. But these insipid tendencies do not mean that friendships are pointless, only that friendship is a terrain of struggle. Empire works to usher its subjects into flimsy relationships where nothing is at stake and to infuse intimacy with violence and domination.”
― Carla Bergman, Joyful Militancy: Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times

“You no longer watch TV, it is TV that watches you (live),�� or again: “You are no longer listening to Don’t Panic, it is Don’t Panic that is listening to you”—a switch from the panoptic mechanism of surveillance (Discipline and Punish [Surveiller et punir]) to a system of deterrence, in which the distinction between the passive and the active is abolished. There is no longer any imperative of submission to the model, or to the gaze “YOU are the model!�� “YOU are the majority!�� Such is the watershed of a hyperreal sociality, in which the real is confused with the model, as in the statistical operation, or with the medium. …Such is the last stage of the social relation, ours, which is no longer one of persuasion (the classical age of propaganda, of ideology, of publicity, etc.) but one of deterrence: “YOU are information, you are the social, you are the event, you are involved, you have the word, etc.�� An about-face through which it becomes impossible to locate one instance of the model, of power, of the gaze, of the medium itself, because you are always already on the other side.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation

“A slow but steady transformation of deviance has taken place in American society. It has not been a change in behavior as such, but in how behavior is defined. Deviant behaviors that were once defined as immoral, sinful, or criminal have been given medical meanings. Some say that rehabilitation has replaced punishment, but in many cases medical treatments have become a new form of punishment and social control.”
― Peter Conrad, Deviance and Medicalization: From Badness to Sickness

“The promise of happiness through consumption can make us chase after experiences or objects that deplete us even though they are pleasurable, closing of our capacity to be affected otherwise. in a different way, social media trains its subjects into perpetual performance of an online identity, and the anxious management of our profiles closes us of from other forms of connection. rigid radicalism induces a hypervigilant search for mistakes and flaws, stifling the capacity for experimentation. none of these modes of subjection dictate how exactly subjects will behave; instead they generate tendencies or attractor points which pull subjects into predictable, stultifying orbits. resisting or transforming these systems is never straightforward, because it means resisting and transforming one’s own habits and desires. it means surprising both the structure and oneself with something unexpected, new, and enabling.”
― Nick Montgomery, Joyful Militancy: Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times

“No one with feeds thinks about it," she said. "When you have the feed all your life, you're brought up to not think about things. Like them never telling you that it's a republic and not a democracy. It's something that makes me angry, what people don't know about these days. Because of the feed, we're raising a nation of idiots. Ignorant, self-centered idiots.”
― M.T. Anderson

“...much more than by its army, its administration, its institutions, and its police, society is held together with spells.”
― Antonin Artaud

“Schools are in many ways perhaps the first step in getting us to understand that institutions control our lives and that we should accept unquestionably that there can be no objection to this.”
― Mango Wodzak, Discovering Eden Fruitarianism - An Autobiography - Volume One

“The vulgar Marxist concept of 'private enterprise' was totally misconstrued by man's irrationality; it was understood to mean that the liberal development of society precluded every private possession. Naturally, this was widely exploited by political reaction. Quite obviously, social development and individual freedom have nothing to do with the so-called abolishment of private property. Marx's concept of private property did not refer to man's shirts, pants, typewriters, toilet paper, books, beds, savings, houses, real estate, etc. This concept was used exclusively in reference to the private ownership of the social means of production, i.e., those means of production that determine the general course of society. In other words: railroads, waterworks, generating plants, coal mines, etc. The 'socialization of the means of production' became such a bugbear precisely because it was confounded to mean the 'private exploitation' of chickens, shirts, books, residences, etc., in conformity with the ideology of the expropriated.”
― Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism

“Most people, Gurion, most people do not violate boundaries, do not defy governance, and most of them come out intact, whereas very few of those who act lawlessly do. And that is why school is so much about following rules. You are here, above all else, to learn to live lawfully for the rest of your life. You are here to learn how to exist in cages without acting as if they are cages, to live like mensches despite being locked in cages. You are here to learn to survive in the world. That is the most basic purpose of our educational system, and it is a high purpose.”
― Adam Levin, The Instructions

“No one with feeds things about it," she said. "When you have the feed all your life, you're brought up to not think about things. Like them never telling you that it's a republic and not a democracy. It's something that makes me angry, what people don't know about these days. Because of the feed, we're raising a nation of idiots. Ignorant, self-centered idiots.”
― M. T. Anderson

“If you ask amateurs to act as front-line security personnel, you shouldn't be surprised when you get amateur security.”
― Bruce Schneier

“All around [the Centre Pompidou and Beauborg Museum], the neighborhood is nothing but a protective zone—remodeling, disinfection, a snobbish and hygienic design—but above all in a figurative sense: it is a machine for making emptiness. It is a bit like the real danger nuclear power stations pose: not lack of security, pollution, explosion, but a system of maximum security that radiates around them, the protective zone of control and deterrence that extends, slowly but surely, over the territory—a technical, ecological, economic, geopolitical glacis. What does the nuclear matter? The station is a matrix in which an absolute model of security is elaborated, which will encompass the whole social field, and which is fundamentally a model of deterrence (it is the same one that controls us globally, under the sign of peaceful coexistence and of the simulation of atomic danger).

The same model, with the same proportions, is elaborated at the Center: cultural fission, political deterrence.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation

“The power of church, state, school or public opinion, or of a monopoly of the instruments of communication, may be so used as to impoverish and imprison the mind. One idea insinuated into the mind may take possession of it and exercise a hypnotic spell. Two or more ideas are better, but if these are methodically selected to suit the purpose of an authority, they still deny freedom. Whoever determines what alternatives shall be made known to man controls what that man should choose from. He is deprived of freedom in proportion as he is denied access to any ideas, or is confined to any range of ideas short of the totality of relevant possibilities.”
― Ralph Barton Perry

“Money is a tool of control invented by the Archons and implemented by your banking families.”
― Sol Luckman, Cali the Destroyer

“The point...was not that we are powerless in the face of history and social structure. It was, rather, to clarify how much of the game has already been played by the time society hands us the controller. Nonetheless, we can and do retain meaningful power and responsibility, even inside the mechanics of a game that is so powerfully rigged. The first rules we learn to follow are the ones that apply to the room we are in. The powers that be have decided those rules, including where the resources are and who is granted access to them. As we saw in the previous chapter, they even set the rules for how the environment responds to our actions, and frequently the environment is hostile. But they don't actually control, directly, what our actions are...We may not be able to control how the room reacts to our speech, but we can speak. We can also choose not to speak, to invite someone else in the room to speak, or to follow their lead.”
― Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò

“These are the kinds of opportunities seized on by deference politics, which considers it a step toward justice to modify interpersonal interactions in compliance with the perceived wishes of the marginalized. While the deference perspective isn't entirely off base, it is potentially limiting and misleading. In such a game, it is much trickier than we realize to avoid moves that intensify elite capture and other oppressive aspects of our social structure--even when we use strategies that correctly identify the distribution of power in the room we're in.”
― Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò

“Liberalism freed men from superstitions like belief in God. Yet, once there was no God, once the moral law had been discredited as equally superstitious, then social control becomes a necessity because the object of self-control, the passions, now had nothing to give them direction or keep them under control. Just as social chaos was the natural result of liberalism’s philosophy, so social control was the natural result of its politics; the one flowed inexorably from the order. The paradox of liberalism lay in the fact that it promoted passion as liberation from traditional morals and belief in God, but only as an intermediary stage followed by the imposition of another more draconian order which it established the benefit not of priests but of scientists and their wealth backers in industry and the regime.”
― E. Michael Jones, Libido Dominandi: Sexual Liberation and Political Control

“We must question the lengths to which society will go to rationalize the official, clandestine, and extralegal weapons of violence used to eradicate populations labeled as undesirable.”
― Brittany Michelle Friedman, Carceral Apartheid: How Lies and White Supremacists Run Our Prisons

“The old world, which is based on the illusion of freedom and the desire to control fate, is fading away yet still fighting to maintain an imperious strong hold...if we look closely, however, there is a new world being built. One that prioritizes love, human and nature connection, joy, and ultimately healing on a collective level.”
― Brittany Michelle Friedman, Carceral Apartheid: How Lies and White Supremacists Run Our Prisons

“Society’s members are psychically pressured into defining ‘true�� and ‘right�� based not on personal experience or direct gnosis (inner knowing), but on what the creators of social discourse put forward as ‘true�� and ‘right’—in other words, what to believe in—even in the absence of genuine logic or compelling evidence.

This situation leads—almost inevitably, it would seem—to the creation of a certain kind of top-down, pyramidal structure that controls society, culture and, given enough free rein, eventually the world itself.”
― Sol Luckman, Get Out of Here Alive: Inner Alchemy & Immortality