Government Quotes – Insights on Leadership and Responsibility

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

Horst Seehofer

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

Dave Smith

"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

"Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…"

Winston Churchill

"Interest groups make the policy. They pull the strings on which political puppets hang, who are allowed to pretend democracy on the stage of the Berlin puppet show. These political figures are then allowed to deflate their speech bubbles in the public service institutions with the toilet ladies Christiansen and Illner. And if there is still some dribbling left after their intellectual urination, they can mingle with the people at the emotional piss trough on Beckmann and Kerner."

Georg Schramm

"Our revolution was the first in the history of mankind that truly reversed the course of government – and that with three little words: "We the People." "We the People" tell the government what to do; it doesn't tell us. "We the People" are the driver; the government is the car. And we decide where it should go, by what route, and how fast. Almost all the world's constitutions are documents in which governments tell the people what their privileges are. Our Constitution, however, is a document in which "We the People" tell the government what it may do. "We the People" are free. This belief has been the foundation for everything I've tried to achieve in the past eight years. But in the 1960s, when I began, it seemed to me we had begun to reverse the order of things. Through more and more rules, regulations, and crushing taxes, the government took more of our money, more choices, and more freedom. I went into politics to raise my hand and say "Stop!" I was a citizen, a politician by conviction – and it seemed the right thing to do. I think we have stopped much of what needed to be stopped. And I hope we have reminded people that man is not free if government has no limits. There is a clear connection here, as clear and predictable as a law of nature: As government grows, liberty shrinks."

Ronald Reagan

"The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries, which result, gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of Public Liberty."

George Washington

"A people that elect corrupt politicians, imposters, thieves and traitors are not victims... but accomplices."

George Orwell

"In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way."

Franklin D. Roosevelt

"World events do not occur by accident. They are made to happen, whether it is to do with national issues or commerce; and most of them are staged and managed by those who hold the purse strings."

Denis Healey

"What makes the difference between a gang and a state is the belief that there is a difference between a gang and a state."

Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski

"I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this—who will count the votes, and how."

Josef Stalin

"School is a sophisticated means of control by the state, created (or usurped from similar approaches by competing entities—churches, cities, private individuals) to accustom all citizens to obedience from childhood, to instill in them the suggestion of the necessity of the state, to nip any idea of emancipation in the bud, to steer the development of their thinking into well-maintained channels, and to drill them into comfortably governable, humble subjects."

Walter Borgius

"The moment the monster state lays its paws on the field of education and instruction, the goal of the best possible physical and mental development of the child disappears and the bare power interest of the state in the chastisement of obedient, submissive and reverent subjects becomes the decisive authority."

Walter Borgius

"We should never forget that the constitution wasn't written to restrain citizens' behavior. It was written to restrain the government's behavior."

Rand Paul

"Unfortunately, science has become political. The virus has become political. And I have said that I do not want to comment on the feasibility and proportionality of this. That is a political question."

Prof. Dr. Hendrik Streeck