Tyranny Quotes – Reflections on Power and Authority

"Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws!"

Mayer Amschel Rothschild

"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

"A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is privately concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men who, even if their action be honest and intended for the public interest, are necessarily concentrated upon the great undertakings in which their own money is involved and who necessarily, by very reason of their own limitations, chill and check and destroy genuine economic freedom."

Woodrow Wilson

"Narrow-mindedness as raison d’état. Whether compulsory vaccination, the energy transition, or socio-political coercive measures: in Germany, there is a dogged insistence on every course once chosen, even when it has long since been disproven by reality. One cause is the prevailing cult of consensus, which treats any intellectual flexibility with suspicion. Thus, a fatal bunker mentality has emerged."

Alexander Grau

"I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the civilized world no longer a Government by free opinion, no longer a Government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a Government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men."

Woodrow Wilson

"Blind obedience to authority is the greatest enemy of truth."

Albert Einstein

"This is why you have labels for anyone expressing skepticism of establishment narratives like “conspiracy theorist”, “useful idiot”, “Russian asset” or “Assadist”; the powerful people who understand that whoever controls the narrative controls the world need labels to separate the faithful from the heathens. It means the same thing as “heretic”."

Caitlin Johnstone

"With the exception only of the period of the gold standard, practically all governments of history have used their exclusive power to issue money to defraud and plunder the people."

Friedrich August von Hayek

"I have never thought, for my part, that man's freedom consists in his being able to do whatever he wills, but that he should not, by any human power, be forced to do what is against his will."

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison."

Henry David Thoreau

"People have no idea how many constraints there are in politics. Politicians are, to some extent, governed by processes, events, and procedures beyond their control. You are not all-powerful—at times, you are simply powerless."

Peter Tauber

"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free."

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past."

George Orwell

"Democracy has nothing to do with freedom. Democracy is mob rule—incited by demagogues and steered in an unstable manner. German democracy in particular displays traits of a soft totalitarianism, marked by pervasive self-censorship that is often scarcely even recognized as such."

Prof. Hans Hermann Hoppe

"Nothing appears more surprizing to those, who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye, than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few; and the implicit submission, with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers."

David Hume

"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

"The fundamental problem with our democracy is that it is not one. The people—the nominal ruler and sovereign—have, in reality, nothing to say. … Behind the democratic façade, a system has been installed in which completely different rules apply than those of the Basic Law. The system is undemocratic and corrupt; it abuses power and unscrupulously deceives citizens. … Every German is free to obey laws to which he has never consented; he may admire the majesty of the Basic Law, whose validity he has never legitimized; he is free to pay homage to politicians whom no citizen has ever elected, and to provide for them lavishly—with his tax money, about the use of which he has never been consulted. Overall, the state and politics are in a condition of which only professional optimists or hypocrites can claim it has arisen from the will of the citizens."

Prof. Dr. Hans Herbert von Arnim

"If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind?"

Claude Frédéric Bastiat