Daily Inspiration Quote by Robert Stone

Paranoia is usually treated as a personal failing; Robert Stone flips it into a reasonable civic instinct. "It's creepy" is doing strategic work here: not "unconstitutional", not "oppressive", just visceral, bodily unease. Stone starts where surveillance actually lands for most people, in the skin, before it ever reaches the courts. That single adjective turns a policy debate into an intimacy violation. Someone "might be watching" is even sharper than "is watching" because it captures the modern reality of monitoring: ambient, probabilistic, hard to prove, impossible to fully dismiss. The uncertainty is the pressure point.

The second sentence is the knife twist. "Why do they need that?" refuses the usual script where institutions get the benefit of the doubt and citizens are asked to perform innocence. Stone makes need, not suspicion, the moral threshold. It is a quiet inversion of power: the watcher must justify themselves to the watched. The pronoun "they" stays deliberately vague, expanding from government agencies to corporations, landlords, platforms, neighbors - anyone with a lens, a log, a dashboard. That vagueness mirrors the actual ecosystem of surveillance, where accountability dissolves across contractors, databases, and "terms of service."

Coming from a novelist steeped in moral weather and compromised authority, the line reads less like a manifesto than like a character's moment of clarity: the recognition that being observed doesn't just record your life, it edits it. The creepiness is the point - it's the sensation of freedom quietly getting smaller.