Justice & Law Quote by L. Neil Smith

Four blunt words do most of the work here: "tired of". Smith isn’t staging a philosophical seminar about liberty; he’s signaling burnout, the emotional exhaustion that arrives when surveillance and petty coercion stop feeling like isolated incidents and start feeling like the climate. The genius of the line is its ordinariness. "Police state" is a loaded term, but pairing it with fatigue rather than outrage makes the complaint harder to dismiss as ideological froth. It sounds like something you’d mutter after one more checkpoint, one more form, one more lecture about compliance.

Smith, a libertarian-leaning science fiction writer, is operating in a tradition that treats the state not as a guardian but as an invasive system with endless appetite. The intent is provocation: to collapse the distance between "normal" governance and authoritarian control by implying we’re already across the line. The subtext is accusatory and strategic: if you’re still comfortable, you’re either complicit, distracted, or benefiting. "Living in" suggests permanence, not a temporary emergency measure. The state isn’t visiting; it’s moved in.

Contextually, this lands in post-1960s American anxieties that spike whenever institutions expand their reach - from drug-war policing to bureaucratic regulation to national-security surveillance. Smith’s move is to frame that expansion as lived experience, not policy debate. It’s less a slogan than a refusal: a demand to call everyday control what it feels like from the inside.