Simon Toyne Quotes

Whenever the government says, 'It's time to move on,' that means there's something they don't want you to know about.

The world is run by monsters and you have to deal with them. Some of them run countries, some of them run banks, some of them run news corporations.

Any unveiling is also veiling. No matter how transparent our governments want to be, governments will be selectively transparent.

Secrecy is the foundation of politics.

Democracy is the fig leaf of elitism.

Bureaucracy always seeks the path of least disclosure.

If he is reelected, I can keep him in ignorance of my affairs.

Nothing is illegal if one hundred well-placed business men decide to do it.

Rather than living in a democracy, we are living in a benevolent oligarchy.

Matrimony is not to be secret but open, in the face of the church.

This claim of being a Muslim State is of course only a camouflage. It is a screen to dupe the common man, so that he may not see clearly that Pakistan is a feudal State in which a clique is trying by these methods to maintain itself in power.

No less a philosopher than Chief Justice Burger was outraged by Ellsberg's publication of classified documents. They belonged to the Government, Burger reasoned, and Ellsberg had no more right to give them to the people than he would have to filch another man's property off a taxicab seat. The Government, of course, commonly leaks classified documents when it deems publication convenient to manipulate public opinion to its advantage. Only the Government, it seems, has a legal right to manipulate opinion with hot documents.

The financial interests have captured the government institutions.

A government by the passions of the multitude, or, no less correctly, according to the vices and ambitions of their leaders, is a democracy.

All our public systems—administrative, justice, education, and political systems are closed systems designed to produce mediocrity.

Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are just putting us on [and acting stupid], or by imbeciles who really mean it.

Politics is a great art. It succeeds at convincing the people that they have to pay for what has been stolen from them.

What is new in our time is the increased power of the authorities to enforce their prejudices.

The class which has the power to rob upon a large scale has also the power to control the government and legalize their robbery.

It is wise to keep the mass of people in ignorance of disaster that may be immediately repaired, or of follies or even vices in government which may be repressed before they become dangerous.

The fight is not over what shall be secret, but over who shall determine what shall be secret.

The problem is that the American public is suspicious of executive power shrouded in secrecy. In the absence of an official picture of what our government is doing, and by what authority, many in the public fill the void by envisioning the worst.

I get really, really concerned when I see somebody, taking $600,000 in speaking fees from Goldman Sachs, will not release what they're actually saying. That's concerning.

Law and politics are often overly complicated because there are people that don't want the rest of us to know what's going on.

We live in a cynical system where the powerful are able to exploit the demand of the aggressive few, from whichever religion or group, to bargain for more power or cynical advantage.