Ken Loach Quotes

Society and the system and politicians don't want people to be aware of things. They want people to believe what they have to show 'em.

They who have put out the people's eyes reproach them for their blindness.

When the people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called "the People's Stick.

Our politicians want to keep us in a negative state because they can easily manipulate us.

I think it's a dangerous thing for anyone to have power over other people.

Justice in the hands of the powerful is merely a governing system like any other. Why call it justice? Let us rather call it injustice, but of a sly effective order, based entirely on cruel knowledge of the resistance of the weak, their capacity for pain, humilation and misery. Injustice sustained at the exact degree of necessary tension to turn the cogs of the huge machine-for-the-making-of-rich-men, without bursting the boiler.

The undeserving maintain power by promoting hysteria.

Next to enjoying ourselves, the next greatest pleasure consists in preventing others from enjoying themselves, or, more generally, in the acquisition of power.

The establishment is a dirty, dangerous beast, and the BBC is a mouthpiece for that.

Sometimes I think that a parody of democracy could be more dangerous than a blatant dictatorship, because that gives people an opportunity to avoid doing anything about it.

The control of information is something the elite always does, particularly in a despotic form of government. Information, knowledge, is power. If you can control information, you can control people.

How strangely will the Tools of a Tyrant pervert the plain Meaning of Words!

When people say 'let's do something about it', they mean 'let's get hold of the political machinery so that we can do something to somebody else.' And that somebody is invariably you.

The truly powerful feed ideology to the masses like fast food while they dine on the most rarified delicacy of all: impunity.

Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence.

I'm not sure why, but I seem to be drawn to stories about abuses of power. But I'm also drawn, not so much to victims' stories, as stories that tend to show how power works. Because if you don't understand the criminals, you can't figure out how to stop the crimes.

Authoritarian systems evolve. Authoritarianism in the Internet Age is not your old Cold War authoritarianism.

Religion is a means of exploitation employed by the strong against the weak; religion is a cloak of ambition, injustice and vice.

The former ruling class kept the community of actors in ignorance by means of various lies.

A functioning police state needs no police.

The more dependent you are, the more ignorant you must be, and that's how they want you.

Suspect power more than vice.

Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many.

I have never been able to conceive how any rational being could propose happiness to himself from the exercise of power over others.

We have a free society, and the totalitarian states are dungeons. We have totally different methods of population control…. We can’t control people so we have to control what they think.