Trevor Paglen > Quotes

“Our pictures are fleeting and elusive. In the far future, bits of hard drives may be fossilized in limestone, and discarded iPhones may find themselves encased in amber, hardened like nail polish, but the bits of humanity that these exquisitely crafted machines hold will be lost to time.”
― Trevor Paglen, The Last Pictures

“No matter how secret a particular satellite was, it had to obey the same laws of physics as the rest of the solar system.”
― Trevor Paglen, Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon's Secret World

“The CIA, an agency designed to operate outside the law, was now free to pursue its vision of a new world, to create new geographies, and to keep that world's details far from the public record. The black world was supercharged with newfound life and purpose.”
― Trevor Paglen, Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon's Secret World

“The private security industry feeds on itself, creating the conditions for its own growth. As unemployment rises, there's more work to be done protecting the increasingly conglomerated wealth. As guns in private hands proliferate, things happen. Blame it on gangs, and there's an argument for even more private security.”
― Trevor Paglen, Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon's Secret World

“The black world is much more than an archipelago of secret bases. It is a secret basis underlying much of the American economy.”
― Trevor Paglen, Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon's Secret World

“With the geosynchronous orbit, the RAE Table maxes out. It has two answers for the orbital lifetime of a spacecraft in GSO: "greater than a million years" and "indefinite.”
― Trevor Paglen, The Last Pictures

“Spyglasses, as Lipperhey called telescopes, whether they're in the form of spotting scopes, spyplanes, or reconnaissance satellites, are more than simple instruments or tools. They beget infrastructures and geographies.”
― Trevor Paglen, Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon's Secret World

“What we see strongly guides what we do: To an extent, we enact what we imagine.”
― Trevor Paglen, Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon's Secret World

“Beginning in the early 1960's, history began to rhyme once again when the Department of Energy and the military began setting off nuclear weapons in the desert. Mushroom clouds lit the skies, and fallout fell like snow. The explosions were called tests, but were nonetheless full-fledged dress rehearsals for Armageddon, perhaps more. Among the desert's longtime residents, the difference between "nuclear testing" and "nuclear war" was far from self-evident.”
― Trevor Paglen, Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon's Secret World