Government Quotes – Insights on Leadership and Responsibility

"Whatever the label on the parties, or the war cries issuing from the demagogues who lead them, the practical choice is between the plutocracy on the one side and a rabble of preposterous impossibilists on the other."

H. L. Mencken

"The great are only great because we are on our knees. Let us rise!"

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

"Journalists cannot serve two masters. To the extent that they take on the task of suppressing information or biting their tongue for the sake of some political agenda, they are betraying the trust of the public and corrupting their own profession."

Thomas Sowell

"Now that no one buys our votes, the public has long since cast off its cares; for the people that once bestowed commands, consulships, legions, and all else, now meddles no more and longs eagerly for just two things - bread and circuses."

Juvenal

"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule."

Henry Louis Mencken

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

Horst Seehofer

"In 14 months, Trump has turned America into a country that people around the world hate, fear, feel sorry for, laugh at, are sickened by, no longer believe in, and want absolutely nothing to do with.
I suppose when you put an utterly stupid, cruel, corrupt, lawless, dishonest madman in the White House, that’ll happen."

Joe Walsh

"When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental - men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or be lost... All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre."

Henry Louis Mencken

"Whenever a king sees that his people are about to revolt against him, he starts a war with another country."

Napoleon Bonaparte

"The easiest way to grab people’s attention is to make them frightened. This is how we are built really as animals. So if you want to distract the public from issues like government corruption or like deteriorating health care system or deteriorating education system, the best thing is to find an external enemy that threatens the survival of the nation and immediately that gets all the attention and people forget about the other things"

Yuval Noah Harari

"The leader is the person who brings a little magic to the moment."

Denise M. Morrison

"The State is the Mafia pretending to a Human Rights Organization"

Dave Smith

"The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it. And even if he is not romantic personally he is very apt to spread discontent among those who are."

Henry Louis Mencken

"The people in the public relations industry aren’t there for the fun of it. They’re doing work. They’re trying to instill the right values. In fact, they have a conception of what democracy ought to be: It ought to be a system in which the specialized class is trained to work in the service of the masters, the people who own the society. The rest of the population ought to be deprived of any form of organization, because organization just causes trouble. They ought to be sitting alone in front of the TV and having drilled into their heads the message, which says, the only value in life is to have more commodities or live like that rich middle class family you’re watching and to have nice values like harmony and Americanism. That’s all there is in life. You may think in your own head that there’s got to be something more in life than this, but since you’re watching the tube alone you assume, I must be crazy …"

Noam Chomsky

"Our president will start a war with Iran because he has absolutely no ability to negotiate. He’s weak and he’s ineffective. So the only way he figures that he’s going to get re-elected, and as sure as you’re sitting there, is to start a war with Iran."

Donald Trump

"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