Government Quotes – Insights on Leadership and Responsibility

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

Horst Seehofer

"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

"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 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

"We've become, now, an oligarchy instead of a democracy. I think that's been the worst damage to the basic moral and ethical standards to the American political system that I've ever seen in my life."

Jimmy Carter

"But the state lieth in all languages of good and evil; and whatever it saith it lieth; and whatever it hath it hath stolen."

Friedrich Nietzsche

"No State can commit so many follies and deeds of violence as the democratic State, for it alone has the organic consciousness of its infallibility, sanctity, and complete legitimacy. Even the most absolute monarchy has limitations of a hundred kinds, in the personal consciousness of responsibility of the ruler (which under democracy is always put on the intangible "will of the people"), in the court clique, in the Church, in the advisers and ministers and "government circles" that inevitably crystallize around every potentate. Moreover, the fear of dethronement, which is theoretically always possible, affects every sole-ruler. But a treacherous circular reasoning protects the rule of the "sovereign people" from any limitation — it is in the right because it is the collective will, and is the collective will because it is in the right."

Egon Friedell

"Give me control over a nation’s currency, and I care not who makes its laws."

Amschel Mayer Rothschild

"The systematic study of mass psychology revealed to students the potentialities of invisible government of society by manipulation of the motives which actuate man in the group."

Edward Bernays