Government Quotes – Insights on Leadership and Responsibility

"Those who decide are not elected, and those who are elected have nothing to decide."

Horst Seehofer

"There are, so to speak, two forms of exercising power. One is the old one we all know: that is oppression.

And then here in the West I have come to know another one that I had not really thought about before.

That is seduction. Seduction is something very insidious. Because you can at least resist paternalism and violence, power.

Then you remain a subject. You can say: 'I am, here I stand, I can do no other.'

Someone who is seduced stands there not even knowing where they are.

They protect their seducers. And such a person will of course always contribute to maintaining the system of seduction.

And that is why this is a much safer way to secure power: to seduce people rather than oppress them.

Incidentally, the Church has known this all along."

Gerald Hüther

"In a democracy, the opposition is not only tolerated as constitutional, but must be maintained because it is indispensable."

Walter Lippmann

"Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under."

Henry Louis Mencken

"The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office. Their principal device to that end is to search out groups who pant and pine for something they can't get and to promise to give it to them. Nine times out of ten that promise is worth nothing. The tenth time is made good by looting A to satisfy B. In other words, government is a broker in pillage, and every election is sort of an advance auction sale of stolen goods."

Henry Louis Mencken

"One might still justify the submission of an entire people to a small number of rulers if those in power were the best among us—but that is not the case, never has been, and never can be. All too often it is the worst, the most insignificant, the most cruel, the most immoral—and especially the most deceitful—who rule. And the fact that this is so is no accident."

Leo Tolstoi (Leo Tolstoy)

"There is less and less free journalism and information. It is only about spreading propaganda that serves an elite"

Novak Djokovic

"Those who are not interested in politics will be forever ruled by those who are."

G. Edward Griffin

"The fatal attraction of government is that it allows busybodies to impose decisions on others without paying any price themselves. That enables them to act as if there were no price, even when there are ruinous prices - paid by others."

Thomas Sowell

"Everything the government is doing right now is designed to make you fat, weak, stupid, depressed, lazy, and reliant on crumbs they wipe off their plates. Health replaced by pharmaceuticals. Education replaced by programming. Hard work replaced by handouts. These people hate you."

Ian Smith Jr.

"It is amazing that people who think we cannot afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, and medication somehow think that we can afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, medication and a government bureaucracy to administer it."

Thomas Sowell

"As civilization has become more complex, and as the need for invisible government has been increasingly demonstrated, the technical means have been invented and developed by which opinion may be regimented."

Edward Bernays

"If you can influence the leaders, either with or without their conscious cooperation, you automatically influence the group which they sway."

Edward Bernays

"We govern what the public think about."

Edward Bernays

"The talent for ruling often conceals the lack of other talents."

Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach

"The form in which all European states are governed today allows the services demanded of citizens to be squandered on foolish, frivolous and criminal undertakings. The whim of individuals, the self-interest of vanishingly small minorities, all too often determines the goal towards which the efforts of the whole are directed. Thus the individual citizen works and bleeds so that wars may be waged which destroy his life or his prosperity, so that fortresses, palaces, railroads, harbors or canals may be built from which neither he nor nine-tenths of the nation will ever derive the slightest benefit, so that new offices may be created, which will make the state machine still more cumbersome, the friction of its wheels still harder, in which he will lose still more of his time, still more of his freedom, so that officials may be highly paid who have no other purpose than to lead an ornamental existence at his expense and to make his existence more difficult; In a word, he works and bleeds in order to make his yoke heavier and his chains tighter and to create the possibility of obtaining even more work and even more blood from him...."

Max Nordau

"In some departments of our daily life, in which we imagine ourselves free agents, we are ruled by dictators exercising great power."

Edward Bernays

"There are invisible rulers who control the destinies of millions. It is not generally realized to what extent the words and actions of our most influential public men are dictated by shrewd persons operating behind the scenes."

Edward Bernays