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.
Interpretation
The quote warns about the increasing surveillance in society as a consequence of accepting restrictions on our freedoms.
Tom Stoppard's quote reflects concerns regarding the trajectory of Western society towards a surveillance state, suggesting that as individuals accept limitations on their freedom and privacy, they inadvertently contribute to a broader system of control that monitors and records the lives of the entire population. This statement serves as a cautionary message to consider the implications of our choices in governance and societal structure, illustrating how the acceptance of minor restraints can lead to significant erosions of liberty.
In practice
In a discussion about privacy laws, this quote can illustrate the potential risks of accepting too many limitations.
Love is - OK, it's 20 things, but it isn't 19. And I think that love reaches for something which is very, very deep in us and is very easily obscured, and is also very easily denied, which is the instinct towards the other person, other than toward the self.
A movie camera is like having someone you have a crush on watching you from afar - you pretend it's not there.
I once did a radio program with a famous materialist, that is to say a scientist who believed that absolutely everything was physical and that all emotions were reductive to little electrical impulses in your neurons. And I found that I didn't believe that. But what the emotions really are, I don't have an alternative theory.
One of the reasons why there are so many versions of Chekhov is that translations date in a way that the original doesn't; translations seem to be of their time.
A Chinaman of the T'ang Dynasty—and, by which definition, a philosopher—dreamed he was a butterfly, and from that moment he was never quite sure that he was not a butterfly dreaming it was a Chinese philosopher. Envy him; in his two-fold security.
Chekhov directors and Chekhov actors love working on his plays because there seems to be no end to what you can find out about the micro-narrative when you're investigating a text.
If peace is equated simply with the absence of war, it can become abject pacifism that turns the world over to the most ruthless.
Our writing equipment takes part in forming our thoughts.
The world is never quiet, even its silence eternally resounds with the same notes, in vibrations which escape our ears. As for those that we perceive, they carry sounds to us, occasionally a chord, never a melody.
How could I bear a crown of gold when the Lord bears a crown of thorns? And bears it for me!
I was escaping from Nature and at last becoming myself, that Other whom I was aspiring to be in the eyes of others.
I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent.
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