Quotes / Secret Police

"Cuius testiculos habes, habeas cardia et cerebellum.

When you have their full attention^Actually...The real translation is 'their balls in your grip', their hearts and minds will follow."

— Discworld

"Ask the American public if they want an FBI wiretap and they'll say, 'No.' If you ask them do they want a feature on their phone that helps the FBI find their missing child they'll say, 'Yes.'"

— Former FBI Director Louis Freeh

Magda: Now, I had very bad fight with my sister once.
Blanche: Oh really? Tell us about it.
Magda: I turned her over to secret police.
Blanche: And?
Magda: And? And what? I turned her over to secret police. No more to tell.

— The Golden Girls, "Sisters and Other Strangers"

"Secrecy is the beginning of tyranny."

— Robert A. Heinlein

"'They think — what do they think? That we're important officials?'
'No. Of course not. They know that we are only pretending that.'
'Then what—'
'But they cannot be sure. We might be important officials. But most of them think we are secret police.'
'But how do you know there are secret police?'
Benito looked very sad. 'Allen, there have to be. You cannot run a bureaucratic state without them.'"

— Inferno (Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle)

"According to Gestapo records...they had little need to engage in direct spying on the citizens since the citizens themselves were more than willing to do their spying for them."

— Kole E. Patterson

"When the militia struck, it was the man drinking cassis in the café, the old woman weighed down with bags, the clerk in stiff collar and polished shoes who suddenly reached over their heads and pulled hoods from invisible folds in the cloth, who slipped enormous flintlocks from hidden holsters and poured into criminal dens. When a cutpurse ran from a shouting victim, it might be a portly man with a bushy moustache (palpably false, everyone would reflect afterwards, why had they not noticed that before?) who would grab the offender in a punishing necklock and disappear with him or her into the crowd.
And afterwards, no witness could say for sure what those agents had looked like in their civilian guise. And no one would ever see the clerk or the portly man or any of them again, in that part of the city.
It was policing by decentralized fear."

— Perdido Street Station

Ema Skye: There were a few calls logged between [Inga Karkhuul Khura'in] and his underlings. They're all members of the secret police, who were directly under the minister's control.
Athena Cykes: You mean like spies?
Apollo Justice: I don't think that's quite it.

— Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Spirit of Justice, Case 6-5: "Turnabout Revolution"

Doyle: Listen, there are certain aspects of my job I'm not entirely happy with, you know.
Anita: I can imagine.
Doyle: Can you? I wonder if you can.
Anita: We do have Secret Police in my country.
Doyle: It's not the same.
Anita: In the name of democracy? Oh, there's some quite dubious People's Democracies around.

— The Professionals, "Blood Sports"

"Here in the Federation, you refer to the Tal Shiar as the Romulan secret police, but it's a bit redundant. You could put the word 'secret' in front of any aspect of Romulan culture."

— Laris, Star Trek: Picard

"Many are the faces of the enemy, and many are the hands which do its work. I trust no-one and spare no effort until I am satisfied that all of Chaos' servants are purged from this place."

— Inquisitor Silas Hand, Warhammer 40,000

"If they spell their name with a different vowel once, then it's off to talk to the nice men with guns, in the building that people go into a lot, but don't seem to come out of so much."

— Zero Punctuation, on Papers, Please

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