A Quote by Joe Bageant

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.

Joe Bageant

Quote Topics

Act Because Boundaries Class Comfortably Door Encroachment Enough Exercise Feel Know Liberties Lightly Live Middle Never Patriot Patriot Act Police Police State Prison Slow State Testing Threatened Try Unless Very

Quote Author

Joe Bageant
American - Author
1946 - March 26, 2011

You never know you are in a prison unless you try the door

Joe Bageant

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.

Paul Craig Roberts

Why certain political classes want purposefully to keep Americans in a state of perpetual debt and uncertainty and why certain people don't want a middle class - because middle class creates a certain happiness. You know what I mean?

John Hodgman

I don't know a lot of writers, even writers who have been on the bestseller list for a few weeks, or writers who have gotten movie options, who can live on just their writing income. Once you break it down to the years it took to write the book, place it, promote it, and you pay the agent, pay the taxes, the annual income is not enough to live on comfortably. I do not have a starving artist inclination. I'm from the working class. I don't feel creative unless I feel like my house is going to be there and I'm going to be fed. I can't worry about money and write. Maybe some people can.

Debra Monroe

How come we never use prison, the failure of prison, as a reason not to give more prison? There's never a moment where we say, 'OK, well, prison hasn't worked, so we're not going to try that again.'

James Forman, Jr.

You see, when you're middle class, you have to live with the fact that history will ignore you. You have to live with the fact that history can never champion your causes and that history will never feel sorry for you. It is the price that is paid for day-to-day comfort and silence. And because of this price, all happinesses are sterile; all sadnesses go unpitied.

Douglas Coupland

I never felt it wasn't mine. But I was also very respectful of not knowing what I didn't know. Because the Marvel Cinematic Universe is very deep, and unless you live in it you can't possibly know it all.

Kari Skogland

The TECH Careers Act will open the door for more Americans to have successful middle-class careers and help small businesses in Connecticut and across the country access a qualified pool of talented workers.

Elizabeth Esty

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.

Alan Furst

Never, never, before Heaven, have I thought of you but as the single, bright, pure, blessed recollection of my boyhood and my youth. Never have I from the first, and never shall I to the last, regard your part in my life, but as something sacred, never to be lightly thought of, never to be esteemed enough, never, until death, to be forgotten.

Charles Dickens

I always want to tell these young idealists that the world is not as dangerous as many in the older generation want them to believe...The [people] for whom I feel the greatest sadness are the ones who choke on their beliefs, who never act on their ideals, who never know the state of struggle in a decent cause, and never know the thrill of even partial victories.

Jonathan Kozol

You can never know enough, never work enough, never use the infinitives and participles oddly enough, never impede the movement harshly enough, never leave the mind quickly enough.

Anne Carson

Ultimately, you just have one life. You never know unless you try. And you never get anywhere unless you ask.

Kate Winslet

You do have this circumstance in Karachi that because people know things are changing, the stakes are higher. Everyone is thinking, "My home is threatened, my job is threatened, my identity is threatened, my world is threatened." And that creates a very particular sort of climate, that is linked.