Democracy Quotes – Reflections on Political Structures

"It’s organized crime. All you do is you call the Republicans the Genoveses and you call the Democrats the Gambinos. The people at the top, they treat it like a crap game. It’s their crap game, like they’re making lots of money. Occasionally, somebody at the table shoots each other, but the moment anything threatens their crap game, they all unite to protect it. ... They’re both controlled by the same financial, economic and corporate interests."

Michael Ruppert

"Anarchy is all around us. Without it, our world would fall apart. All progress is due to it. All order extends from it. All blessed things that rise above the state of nature are owned to it. The human race thrives only because of the lack of control, not because of it. I’m saying that we need ever more absence of control to make the world a more beautiful place. It is a paradox that we must forever explain."

Jeffrey Tucker

"Someone asked me the other day if I believe in conspiracies. Well, sure. Here's one. It is called the political system. It is nothing if not a giant conspiracy to rob, trick and subjugate the population."

Jeffrey Tucker

"On a metaphysical level, the State, whether real or imagined, is a faith based deity existing in the minds of its believers, generally based on a combination of the adoration of a Great Man along with an illogical fear of a Bogeyman in conjunction with an unblinking faith in the political process. That faith in turn relies on a dramatic opera-like performance on the part of politicians as they attempt to appear relevant, while the shadow government of bureaucrats and corporate/banking puppet masters attempts to remain unseen. All the while the State struggles to provide services it claims the monopolistic right to provide, while miserably failing at providing those services. On the occasion that the State's true nature is revealed and its failures exposed, it always responds by sending in waves of lies by actors on all levels, while systematically discrediting, beating down, or murdering anyone who shines the light on those failures.

The State relies on an incredibly delicate balancing act between the disinterest of its victims, the imagery of a functioning political process, and faith in government-lead progress toward some mythical idea of a better tomorrow, in contrast with the reality of a non-functional puppet political process and an ever growing ever consuming Beast, driving humanity toward world-wide slavery at best, and species wide destruction as a very real possibility."

Ben Stone

"Politicians should wear sponsor jackets like Nascar Drivers. Then we know who owns them."

Robin Williams

"No one in their right mind would let a sixteen-year-old whose parents gave them an anatomy atlas for Christmas remove their appendix. No one who wants to build a house for themselves and their family would hire a sixteen-year-old architect who has only built sandcastles so far. And no one who can tell the difference between a hedge fund and a building society savings agreement would entrust their fortune to a sixteen-year-old. But when it comes to the climate and the world we live in, noisy children suddenly mutate into esteemed prophets of impending doom."

Henryk M. Broder

"The state is an institution run by gangs consisting of murderers, looters, and thieves, surrounded by compliant henchmen, propagandists, sycophants, crooks, liars, clowns, charlatans, charmers, and useful idiots—an institution that dirties and obscures everything it touches."

Prof. Hans-Hermann Hoppe

"Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule—and both commonly succeed, and are right... The United States has never developed an aristocracy really disinterested or an intelligentsia really intelligent. Its history is simply a record of vacillations between two gangs of frauds."

H. L. Mencken

"The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist."

Hannah Arendt

"The threat to freedom in Germany does not come with violence and noise, but rather quietly. It comes with all sorts of justifications, often well-intentioned ones. For example, when it comes to civil rights. In times when we are all concerned about the threat of terrorism, when we all naturally have to do everything we can for our citizens so that they can live happy lives unharmed. In times like these, parties and politicians come along and say, 'Now is the time to once again gradually reduce civil rights, which always bother us a little anyway. Freedom always dies inch by inch, as Karl Herrman Flach once put it. And freedom does not die because of politicians, it does not die because politicians want to restrict civil rights and liberties, but rather it becomes dangerous for freedom when citizens forget their own immune system, which must arm them against any threat to freedom. And for me, that is the decisive self-image of our party. That we say: For us, the citizen comes first and then the state. Other parties trust the state first and only then trust the citizens. Under the pretext of creating security, every civil right can be called into question. Under the pretext that security requires it, every tightening of the law can be decided. We fight this wherever we can, in the federal government, in parliament, but ladies and gentlemen, we also need the citizens. We also need self-confident citizens who do not accept the statement: “If you have nothing to hide, you should not complain.” No, we want a nation of self-confident citizens, not subjects of the state."

Guido Westerwelle

"If something is wrong for you or me, it is also wrong for the cop, the soldier, the mayor, the governor, the general, the Fed chairman, the president. Theft does not become acceptable when they call it taxation, counterfeiting when they call it monetary policy, kidnapping when they call it the draft, mass murder when they call it foreign policy. We understand that it is never acceptable to wield violence nor the threat of violence against the innocent, whether by the mugger or the politician."

Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr.

"It isn't a coincidence that governments everywhere want to educate children. Government education, in turn, is supposed to be evidence of the state's goodness and its concern for our well-being. The real explanation is less flattering. If the government's propaganda can take root as children grow up, those kids will be no threat to the state apparatus. They'll fasten the chains to their own ankles."

Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr.

"When I sometimes leaf through my company's press review in the morning, I get the feeling that the range of opinion used to be broader. There is an astonishing homogeneity in German editorial offices when it comes to weighing up and classifying information. The pressure to conform in the minds of journalists seems to me to be quite high."

Frank-Walter Steinmeier

"The state of emergency will tend to be extended more and more. Dangerous situations will be artificially prolonged. States and governments will begin to get used to this power. They will start to like it. The surveillance states that are currently being established will outlast the coronavirus!"

Edward Snowden

"The best way to control the opposition is to lead it ourselves."

Vladimir Lenin

"Freedom can never be completely safeguarded by rules and laws. It is as much dependent on the courage, integrity, and responsibility of each of us as it is on these qualities in those who govern. Every trait in us and our leaders which points to passive submission to mere power betrays democratic freedom. In our American system of democratic government, three different powerful branches serve to check each other, the executive, the legislative, and the judiciary. Yet when there is no will to prevent encroachment of the power of one by any of the others, this system of checks, too, can degenerate."

Joost A.M. Meerloo

"I’m from Germany and I think history is repeating itself right now. Germany is becoming a police state. You are constantly asked for your papers. It’s just like in the Hitler era."

Julia Dietze

"When we give government the power to make medical decisions for us, we in essence accept that the state owns our bodies."

Ron Paul