A Quote by Michel Foucault

Our society is not one of spectacle but of surveillance.

Michel Foucault

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Our Our Society Society Spectacle Surveillance

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Michel Foucault
French - Historian
October 15, 1926 - June 25, 1984

What is the society we wish to protect? Is it the society of complete surveillance for the commonwealth? Is this the wealth we seek to have in common - optimal security at the cost of maximal surveillance?

Tom Stoppard

Orwell wasn't right about where society was in 1984. We haven't turned into that sort of surveillance society. But that may be, at least in small part, because of his book. The notion that ubiquitous surveillance and state manipulation of the media is evil is deeply engrained in us.

Ramez Naam

I think mass surveillance is a bad idea because a surveillance society is one in which people understand that they are constantly monitored.

Trevor Paglen

The spectacle is the bad dream of a modern society in chains and ultimately expresses nothing more than its wish for sleep. The spectacle is the guardian of that sleep.

Guy Debord

Closed Circuit' came out of a general anxiety about surveillance. Government surveillance and private surveillance.

Steven Knight

The concept of surveillance is ingrained in our beings. God was the original surveillance camera.

Hasan M. Elahi

Modern capitalism, organising the reduction of all social life to a spectacle, cannot offer any spectacle other than that of our own alienation.

Attila Kotanyi

You can't blame movies for embracing spectacle; filmmakers since D.W. Griffith and Cecil B. De Mille have loved spectacle, and spectacle is something that movies convey like no other medium, especially in a digital age.

Steve Erickson

The best proof of the high quality of American beef is the continued negative BSE findings supported by the highest surveillance possible. The administration should be working to increase our surveillance of BSE, not scaling it back.

Rosa DeLauro

When you try to grasp the way the Western world is going, you see that we are on a ratchet towards a surveillance state, which is coming to include the whole population in its surveillance. This is our reward for accepting the restraints on the way we live now.

Tom Stoppard

A funny thing happened on the way to utopia: We've turned into this surveillance society and become a race of spies, where we track our kids and we track our spouses and we track our friends. I think very soon there will be an obsolescence of trust, because it's much easier to access a person's location than it is to ask - or to trust.

Dave Eggers

We grow tyrannical fighting tyranny. . . . The most alarming spectacle today is not the spectacle of the atomic bomb in an unfederated world, it is the spectacle of the Americans beginning to accept the device of loyalty oaths and witch hunts, beginning to call anybody they don't like a Communist.

E. B. White

What we have now in America is a surveillance society.

Nat Hentoff

Incidentally, our railroad facilities are under video surveillance by the federal police. However, the federal and state governments will have to determine whether video surveillance shouldn't be significantly expanded to a certain degree.

Otto Schily

The combination of the growth of these digital technologies, the ability of the government to conjure up these secret interpretations, plus a very unusual and novel court make for this ever-expanding surveillance state. We so treasure our freedoms; we will regret it if our generation doesn't use this unique time to reform the surveillance laws and make it clear that security and liberty are not mutually exclusive. We can do both.

Ron Wyden

There's been spying for years, there's been surveillance for years, and so forth, I'm not going to pass judgement on that, it's the nature of our society.

Eric Schmidt

A Quote by Michel Foucault

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