Democracy | Some revealing quotes

"One of the most significant moments for me in my professional career, apart from being sworn in as an attorney, was signing my first - also successful - constitutional complaint. It pains me to no longer be able to trust Germany's highest court in a fundamental way." Jessica Hamed

"Inflation does not come upon us as a curse or as a tragic fate; it is always caused by reckless or even criminal policies." Ludwig Erhard

"Give them a lying newspaper in the morning, let them work a lot during the day for little money and bring the latest manipulated news on TV in the evening, alternating with dumbed-down shows, movies and commercials. Thus they have no more time to think consciously." Unbekannt

"Impersonal forces over which we have almost no control seem to be pushing us all in the direction of the Brave New Worldian nightmare; and this impersonal pushing is being consciously accelerated by representatives of commercial and political organizations who have developed a number of new techniques for manipulating, in the interest of some minority, the thoughts and feelings of the masses." Aldous Huxley

"Every friend of freedom must be as revolted as I am by the prospect of turning the United States into an armed camp, by the vision of jails filled with casual drug users and of an army of enforcers empowered to invade the liberty of citizens on slight evidence." Milton Friedman

"While the State exists, there can be no freedom. When there is freedom there will be no State." Wladimir Lenin

"Political and economic power in the United States is concentrated in the hands of a “ruling elite” that controls most of U.S.-based multinational corporations, major communication media, the most influential foundations, major private universities and most public utilities. Founded in 1921, the Council of Foreign Relations is the key link between the large corporations and the federal government. It has been called a “school for statesmen” and “comes close to being an organ of what C. Wright Mills has called the Power Elite – a group of men, similar in interest and outlook shaping events from invulnerable positions behind the scenes. The creation of the United Nations was a Council project, as well as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank." Steve Jacobson

"That the manufacture of consent is capable of great refinements no one, I think, denies. The process by which public opinions arise is certainly no less intricate than it has appeared in these pages, and the opportunities for manipulation open to anyone who understands the process are plain enough. . . . as a result of psychological research, coupled with the modern means of communication, the practice of democracy has turned a corner. A revolution is taking place, infinitely more significant than any shifting of economic power. . . . Under the impact of propaganda, not necessarily in the sinister meaning of the word alone, the old constants of our thinking have become variables. It is no longer possible, for example, to believe in the original dogma of democracy; that the knowledge needed for the management of human affairs comes up spontaneously from the human heart. Where we act on that theory we expose ourselves to self-deception, and to forms of persuasion that we cannot verify. It has been demonstrated that we cannot rely upon intuition, conscience, or the accidents of casual opinion if we are to deal with the world beyond our reach." Walter Lippmann

"It is with knowledge of the human being, his tendencies, his desires, his needs, his psychic mechanisms, his automatisms as well as knowledge of social psychology and analytical psychology that propaganda refines its techniques." Jacques Ellul

"These organizations represent the collective interests of the largest corporations on earth. They not only retain armies of policy wonks and researchers to articulate their agenda and form a consensus internally, but also use their massive accumulation of unwarranted influence in media, industry, and finance to manufacture a self-serving consensus internationally. To believe that this corporate-financier oligarchy would subject their agenda and fate to the whims of the voting masses is naive at best. They have painstakingly ensured that no matter who gets into office, in whatever country, the guns, the oil, the wealth and the power keep flowing perpetually into their own hands. [....] The real revolution will commence when we identify the above equation as the true brokers of power and when we begin systematically removing our dependence on them, and their influence on us from our daily lives. The global corporate-financier oligarchy needs us, we do not need them, independence from them is the key to our freedom." Tony Cartalucci

"It is the emergence of mass media which makes possible the use of propaganda techniques on a societal scale. The orchestration of press, radio and television to create a continuous, lasting and total environment renders the influence of propaganda virtually unnoticed precisely because it creates a constant environment. Mass media provides the essential link between the individual and the demands of the technological society." Jacques Ellul

"But what could make democracy attractive to the powerful, whose very power it limits and threatens? The answer is quite simple: Nothing! For democracy means precisely to restrict the power needs of the powerful and the rich, in which they naturally have no interest. This now results in a tension between the needs of the rulers to stabilize their status and our need to feel socially autonomous and self-determined with regard to our social situation. In history, this fundamental tension has often been discharged in the form of revolutions. From the point of view of the rulers, how can this tension be defused if we want to avoid bloody revolutions? The solution lies in 'satisfying' the citizens' need for freedom with a surrogate, with a substitute drug, namely the illusion of democracy. To create such an illusion of democracy, one needs above all - and this is where the herd metaphor comes into play again - an ideology of justification that justifies why the people are immature and in need of leadership. Furthermore, the idea of democracy, which is so attractive to the people, must be emptied of its meaning so that it is limited only to an electoral act. And finally, continuous democracy management is needed to ensure that the people want what they are supposed to want in the act of voting." Prof. Rainer Mausfeld

"It’s about what you would expect from a bipartisan democracy campaign — it’s an attempt to impose what is called democracy, meaning rule by the rich and the powerful, without interference by the mob but within the framework of formal electoral procedures." Noam Chomsky

"The real president is whoever controls the teleprompter" Elon Musk