Politics Quotes – Insights and Reflections on Politics

"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

"It was sheer foolishness to create this system. For centuries people will write about it as a kind of monument of collective stupidity."

William Hague

"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.

"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

"Our society is run by mad men, for crazy targets. I think we are driven by mad men, to a mad end, And I think I am imprisoned as a madman because I say that. That is what's insane about it."

John Lennon

"An urgent word to Mayor Keck and all current political decision-makers: There is no tyranny of the unvaccinated! Educate yourselves before proclaiming such theses. Advocate for an immediate end to discrimination and unequal treatment of the unvaccinated in public life, workplaces, schools, and daycare centers. Demand a halt to the downplaying of vaccine information and a return to scientific neutrality incorporating economics and social sciences, moving away from the lobby-aligned panic policies that deliberately ignore scientific facts and trample on fundamental democratic values."

Prof. Dr. Jörg Fuß

"When I look at the German history of the last hundred years, I do not know if I have to be more afraid of criminals or the state."

Ranga Yogeshwar

"....there are wolves hiding in the gray herd, that is, individuals who still know what freedom is. (...) That is the nightmare of those in power."

Ernst Jünger

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"

Upton Sinclair

"The well-known school critic and teacher John Taylor Gatto identifies seven lessons as the real teachings of school:

Confusing the student
Awakening class consciousness
Teaching indifference
Creating intellectual and emotional dependence
Weakening self-confidence
and Accustoming students to constant supervision.

"School condemns most people to being lowly building blocks in a pyramidal social model. In collaboration with television, schooling robs children of the time they need to develop a unique personality, thereby preventing them from growing up. School has replaced the ‘family curriculum’ with the components of privacy, independence, and social life. In its place has come the factory school, a prison for children's souls that fragments social relationships into networks and cannot be survived without damage."

"It replaces the intellectual growth of children with the violent creation of subjects.
It kills the curiosity of its subjects, places them in a dense fog of confusion from which many will never be able to free themselves in their entire lives, it blocks their path to individual freedom and denies them the fulfillment that comes with a free spirit.""

John Taylor Gatto

"The state subjugates, imprisons, and kills. People tend to forget this because law-abiding citizens submit to the authority of the government without complaint in order to avoid punishment. But lawyers are more realistic and call a law that cannot be enforced by coercion an imperfect law. The authority of man-made laws rests entirely on the weapons of the police, who enforce obedience to their regulations"

Ludwig von Mises

""...Every decline in the value of money is caused and organized by the state. Paper money and the central bank monopoly are the great super-tricks used to camouflage the violent nature of the state and the predatory basic pattern of ALL politics. Very few citizens are truly aware of the unimaginable extent to which they have been exploited for generations by the combination of progressive income tax and inflation, robbing them of the fruits of their labor.""

Roland Baader

"I have made the decision to skip the Australian Open next year after X years because I have reached a point in my career where fame is not everything. I cannot identify with the Australian government's Covid measures, the possible quarantine requirement, and the Covid camps also put me off. I can honestly say that I would not travel to Australia with peace of mind, either for the singles qualifiers or for my favorite doubles team."

Tímea Babos

"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 strongest analogy is to medicines, and you know is there something to worry about with medicines that is - might some of them have side effects? do we need safety testing,,i mean we´re taking things that are, you know, genetically modified organisms. and we´re injecting them in little kids´arms. we just shoot it right into the vein..."

Bill Gates

"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

"There is another important weapon the totalitarians use in their campaign to frighten the world into submission. This is the weapon of psychological shock. Hitler kept his enemies in a state of constant confusion and diplomatic upheaval. They never knew what this unpredictable madman was going to do next. Hitler was never logical, because he knew that that was what he was expected to be. Logic can be met with logic, while illogic cannot—it confuses those who think straight. The Big Lie and monotonously repeated nonsense have more emotional appeal in a cold war than logic and reason. While the enemy is still searching for a reasonable counter-argument to the first lie, the totalitarians can assault him with another."

Joost A.M. Meerloo