Technocracy Quotes – Insights and Reflections

"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

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

Horst Seehofer

"The first bachelor generation is just climbing the university chairs. People who are perfectly trained in their craft, who have internalized the hegemonic ideology, and who are good advertising media for a system that needs academic confirmation in order to be able to continue to say 'democracy'. This generation already determines what 'good science' is. It fills journals, conference programs, and so eventually textbooks, lectures, and seminars - with topics, perspectives, and terms it has taken from the political agenda and the tenders linked to it, and which it doesn't question because it couldn't learn that anywhere."

Michael Meyen

"Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty."

Hannah Arendt

"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

"Planners claim that their plans are scientific and that, among decent people with good intentions, there can be no disagreements about them. Yet there is no such thing as a "scientific ought." Science serves to determine what is. It can never prescribe what ought to be or what goals people should pursue. It is a fact that people disagree in their value judgments. It is outrageous to arrogate to oneself the right to override others' plans and force them to submit to the planner's design."

Ludwig von Mises

"We will try to accommodate policymakers a little."

Dr. Martin Terhardt

"I have [...] the impression that most politicians are still not aware just how much they are controlled today by the financial markets, indeed that they are ruled by them."

Prof. Dr. Dr. h. c. mult. Hans Tietmeyer

"Germany is a supertanker—but sitting in the bridge is not the Federal Chancellor. Sitting there are the people here on this podium."

Ernst-Moritz Lipp

"The power structures that have emerged are not democratically legitimized, and they can no longer be voted out of office through any electoral process. The most important power structures in our society are no longer accessible to the voter at all… and one does not want the ordinary citizen to even know that they exist. They are meant to remain invisible within the framework of public debate."

Prof. Rainer Mausfeld

"Perhaps the following current example can best illustrate this point. We do not live in the clerical age, where lay people and clergy fought each other; nor do we live in the state-political age, when state officials and the people fought over democracy. The free growth area in the scientific age lies in a new pair of tensions, namely between research and knowledge. This pair of conflicts is still largely unclear.

We scholars all disguise ourselves as researchers, just as the old clergy behaved like saints in order to hold back the division between clergy and people. This does not change the fact that today the danger of the sciences becoming ossified is looming large.

Scholars are competent and therefore completely incapable of loving the overthrow of their virtue. They are science officials, and they always oppose amateurs. But since research is as much a part of science as the Holy Spirit is part of the Church, there is a great deal of pseudo-research competing with the progress of free research; and only the former is conscientiously supported by official bodies and foundations, because only this appears worthy of support to the professional officials of science.

Such harmful research acts according to the principle: Wash my fur, but don't get me wet.

It researches cancer according to Pasteur's outdated ideas, as if it were rabies.

It examines religion according to Wellhausen's ideas, but because it bases its research on ancient authority, it is extensively funded.

As long as scholars and researchers both remain poor, genuine research has prospects. That was the case until 1900. Today, the prognosis for research is deteriorating because grateful peoples are generously funding “science.” Thus, power is shifting to the side of the knowledgeable, against the researchers.

Our doctor factories and Rockefeller fellows are eloquent witnesses to this."

Eugen Rosenstock

"It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong."

Thomas Sowell

"Politicians should wear sponsor jackets like Nascar Drivers. Then we know who owns them."

Robin Williams

"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

"I don’t want a nation of thinkers, I want a nation of workers."

John D. Rockefeller

"The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded. Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite. It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system–ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society."

Dwight D. Eisenhower

"No science is immune to the infection of politics and the corruption of power."

Jacob Bronowski

"Essentially, during a pandemic, a benevolent dictatorship is a good way to manage the crisis. Sometimes, centralized decisions need to be implemented"

Peter Indra