Politik

"Freedom is a demagogue."

"The peculiar office of a demagogue is to advance his own interests, by affecting a deep devotion to the interests of the people. Sometimes the object is to indulge malignancy, unprincipled and selfish men submitting but to two governing motives, that of doing good to themselves, and that of doing harm to others. The true theatre of a demagogue is a democracy, for the body of the community possessing the power, the master he pretends to serve is best able to reward his efforts. As it is all important to distinguish between those who labor in behalf of the people on the general account, and those who labor in behalf of the people on their own account, some of the rules by which each may be known shall be pointed out. The motive of the demagogue may usually be detected in his conduct. The man who is constantly telling the people that they are unerring in judgment, and that they have all power, is a demagogue. Bodies of men being composed of individuals, can no more be raised above the commission of error, than individuals themselves, and, in many situations, they are more likely to err, from self-excitement and the division of responsibility. The power of the people is limited by the fundamental laws, or the constitution, the rights and opinions of the minority, in all but those cases in which a decision becomes indispensable, being just as sacred as the rights and opinions of the majority; else would a democracy be, indeed, what its enemies term it, the worst species of tyranny. In this instance, the people are flattered, in order to be led; as in kingdoms, the prince is blinded to his own defects, in order to extract favor from him."

"We know that extremist demagogues emerge from time to time in all societies, even in healthy democracies. The United States has had its share of them, including Henry Ford, Huey Long, Joseph McCarthy, and George Wallace. An essential test for democracies is not whether such figures emerge but whether political leaders, and especially political parties, work to prevent them from gaining power in the first place—by keeping them off mainstream party tickets, refusing to endorse or align with them, and when necessary, making common cause with rivals in support of democratic candidates. Isolating popular extremists requires political courage. But when fear, opportunism, or miscalculation leads established parties to bring extremists into the mainstream, democracy is imperiled."

"Demosthenes: A demagogue must be neither an educated nor an honest man; he has to be an ignoramus and a rogue."

"In Amazon societies, women were mothers and their society's only warriors; mothers and their society's only hunters; mothers and their society's only political and religious leaders. No division of labor based on sex seems to have existed in such societies. Although Amazon leaders existed and queens were elected, the societies seem to have been...ones in which any woman could aspire to and achieve full human expression."

"Survival is the characteristic property of power. To those who think I am suggesting that we have a war between the sexes, I say: but we've always had one...Should or can there be a single standard of behavior for both sexes? Is there such a thing as a biologically rooted female culture that should remain separate from male culture, partly because it is different than or superior to male culture?"

"Matriarchy is a stage on the way to patriarchy, to man’s fullest realization of himself; he goes from worshipping Nature through women to conquering it. Though it’s true that woman’s lot worsened considerably under patriarchy, she never had it good; for despite all the nostalgia it is not hard to prove that matriarchy was never an answer to women’s fundamental oppression. Basically it was no more than a different means of counting lineage and inheritance, one which, though it might have held more advantages for women than the later patriarchy, did not allow women into the society as equals. To be worshipped is not freedom. For worship still takes place in someone else’s head, and that head belongs to Man. Thus throughout history, in all stages and types of culture, women have been oppressed due to their biological functions."

"People say, “Well, what could anybody do as president?” the one man could turn this country around. The one proper president could turn this country around. I firmly believe that."

"The most thoroughly and relentlessly Damned, banned, excluded, condemned, forbidden, ostracized, ignored, suppressed, repressed, robbed, brutalized and defamed of all Damned things is the individual human being. The social engineers, statisticians, psychologists, sociologists, market researchers, landlords, bureaucrats, captains of industry, bankers, governors, commissars, kings and presidents are perpetually forcing this Damned Thing into carefully prepared blueprints and perpetually irritated that the Damned Thing will not fit into the slot assigned to it. The theologians call it a sinner and tries to reform it. The governor calls it a criminal and tries to punish it. The psychotherapist calls it neurotic and tries to cure it. Still, the Damned Thing will not fit into their slots."

"All presidents rail against the press. It goes with the turf."

"What I am condemning is that one power, with a president who has no foresight, who cannot think properly, is now wanting to plunge the world into a holocaust."

"It is through education that the daughter of a peasant can become a doctor, that the son of a mineworker can become the head of the mine, that a child of farmworkers can become the president of a great nation. It is what we make out of what we have, not what we are given, that separates one person from another."

"We are both humbled and elevated by the honour and privilege that you, the people of South Africa, have bestowed on us, as the first President of a united, democratic, non-racial and non-sexist government. We understand it still that there is no easy road to freedom We know it well that none of us acting alone can achieve success. We must therefore act together as a united people, for national reconciliation, for nation building, for the birth of a new world. Let there be justice for all. Let there be peace for all."

"In my country we go to prison first and then become President."

"Bush is now undermining the United Nations. He is acting outside it, not withstanding the fact that the United Nations was the idea of President Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. Both Bush, as well as Tony Blair, are undermining an idea which was sponsored by their predecessors."

"The President is the last person in the world to know what the people really want and think."

"By almost universal agreement, the most vague and ineffectual of all Presidents was Millard Fillmore, who succeeded to the office in 1850 upon the death of Zachary Taylor, and spent the next three years demonstrating how the country would have been run if they had just propped Taylor up in a chair with cushions."

"American university presidents are a nervous breed; I have never thought well of them as a class."

"Presidents are made, not born. That’s a good thing to remember. It’s silly to think that Presidents are born, because very few people are 35 years old at birth, and those who are won’t admit it. So if you’re only 16 don’t be discouraged, because it’s only a phase and there’s nothing wrong with you that you won’t outgrow."

"No external party has anything to do with the future of Syria, with the constitution or president or anything like this. We’re not going to discuss it with them. This is a Syrian issue. Whenever the Syrian people want to change their president, it should be changed right away, in the same day… even if we exaggerate, it should be through a political process, through a constitutional process. That’s how we change presidents, not through terrorism and external intervention."

"Let us not be mistaken: the best government in the world, the best parliament and the best president, cannot achieve much on their own. And it would be wrong to expect a general remedy from them alone. Freedom and democracy include participation and therefore responsibility from us all."

"The difference between being a good w:governor and president is approximately the difference between sandlot basketball and the NBA Finals."

"If you want to see your plays performed the way you wrote them, become President."

"There used to be a time when this country's president could have delivered the same New Year's Address he had given a year before, and nobody would have noticed. Fortunately, that time has passed."

"My dear friends, I bid you farewell as your President. I remain with you as your fellow citizen!"

"Today, every president is the target of criticism and mockery. It is inconceivable that even the most caustic critic would be imprisoned for his or her words."

"The West German revanchists and militarists are using the peace-loving position of the USSR and the member-states of the Warsaw Pact on the resolution of German question, so as to inflict harm on the German Democratic Republic through subversive activity and the illegal recruitment of citizens of the German Democratic Republic. For this, they primarily use the open border in Berlin. In the interests of the peaceful work and construction by the citizens of the German Democratic Republic and of the member-states of the Warsaw Pact, it is necessary to stop the illegal recruitment and other hostile measures. Therefore, we propose that the member-states of the Warsaw Pact agree, in the interests of the cessation of the subversive activity, to implement control along the borders of the German Democratic Republic, including the borders in Berlin, comparable to the control along the state borders of the Western powers."

"We do not want a united Germany. This would lead to a change to postwar borders and we cannot allow that because such a development would undermine the stability of the whole international situation and could endanger our security."

"Forget not the tyranny of this wall...nor the love of freedom that made it fall..."

"Eventually, the buildings on the Bernauer Strasse, as elsewhere on the East Berlin/West Berlin border, were entirely demolished. No more dramatic escapes from windows. No more abseiling from the roof. No more desperate fugitives plummeting to their deaths on the cobbled street below. Nothing was to get in the way of the new, impregnable Wall. It would keep the state’s citizens trapped inside the GDR until... they resigned themselves to their fate and simply stopped resisting."

"By 1989, shooting people on the border was unacceptable, and even the cosseted old men at Wandlitz knew it. None the less, the Wall still stood proud and ugly, with its sturdy blocks, its spikes and fences and alarms and watch-towers, seemingly permanent and impregnable. Its fate would not be determined in Berlin. Mostly it would be decided hundreds of miles away, by people who had decided that a Communism which needed to be enforced by guns and barbed wire was not a Communism worth having."

"Every stone bears witness to the moral bankruptcy of the society it encloses"

"The Soviet Union could not exist without the image of the empire. The image of the empire could not exist without the image of force. The USSR ended the moment the first hammer pounded the Berlin Wall."

"We welcome change and openness; for we believe that freedom and security go together, that the advance of human liberty can only strengthen the cause of world peace. There is one sign the Soviets can make that would be unmistakable, that would advance dramatically the cause of freedom and peace. General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization, come here to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this Wall!"

"I am not the one trying to speed things up. We are being driven."

"The Wall certainly ought not to be a permanent feature of the European landscape. I see no reason why the Soviet Union should think it is—it is to their advantage in any way to leave there that monument to communist failure."

"As long as there is a wall, barbed wire and orders to shoot, there can be no talk of normality in Germany."

"General Secretary Gorbachev’s policy of restructuring brings with it, for the first time since the end of World War II, a justifiable hope of overcoming the East-West conflict."

"The fall of Wall Street is for market fundamentalism what the fall of the Berlin Wall was for communism."

"The Berlin Wall is perhaps the most visible expression of the moral gulf between free democracy and totalitarian dictatorship."

"When they met in Vienna in the spring of 1961 Khrushchev bullied the young president: “It is up to the U.S. to decide whether there will be war or peace.” “If that’s true,” Kennedy responded, “it’s going to be a cold winter.” Then on August 3, 1961, the Berlin Wall suddenly went up—much to Kennedy’s relief. “Why would Khrushchev put up a wall if he really intended to seize West Berlin?” Kennedy wondered. “There wouldn’t be any need of a wall if he planned to occupy the whole city. This is his way out of his predicament. It’s not a very nice solution, but a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.”"

"The Wall will still be standing in 50 and even in 100 years; if the reasons for it have not been removed by then."

"[Erich Honecker] was succeeded by ‘a brief and embarrassed phantom’ (to use Disraeli’s phrase) called Egon Krentz, who lasted exactly seven weeks. On 4 November a million marched in East Berlin. Five days later, at a historic press conference held by the East Berlin party boss, Gunter Schabowski, it was announced that frontier police would no longer try to prevent East Germans from leaving the country. A Daily Telegraph reporter asked the key question: ‘What about the Berlin Wall?’ and was told it was no longer an exit-barrier. That night the Berlin Wall, the ugly and despised testament to Communist oppression, where so many hundreds of German democrats had died trying to escape, was the scene of a wild orgy of rejoicing and destruction, as young Germans hacked at it with pickaxes. Television carried these historic scenes around the world and in other East European capitals, and, to use, ironically, a phrase of Marx’s, ‘the enflamed masses began to scream ça ira, ça ira!’"

"The [Berlin] wall can disappear when those conditions that created it fall away."

"In the summer of 1989, neither Helmut Kohl nor I anticipated ... that everything would happen so fast. We didn’t expect the wall to come down in November. And by the way, we both admitted that later. I don’t claim to be a prophet. This happens in history: it accelerates its progress. It punishes those who are late. But it has an even harsher punishment for those who try to stand in its way. It would have been a big mistake to hold onto the Iron Curtain. That is why we didn’t put any pressure on the government of the GDR. When events started to develop at a speed that no one expected, the Soviet leadership unanimously – and I want to stress “unanimously” – decided not to interfere in the internal processes that were under way in the GDR, not to let our troops leave their garrisons under any circumstances. I am confident to this day that it was the right decision."

"Freedom has many difficulties and democracy is not perfect, but we have never had to put a wall up to keep our people in, to prevent them from leaving us."

"The Wall was in the long run a propaganda catastrophe for the East. Every day it existed, it screamed aloud one simple, damning statement: in Berlin we Communists stood in direct competition with capitalism, and we lost. Khrushchev and his successors had to live with this permanent mute accusation until a Soviet leader came along who just couldn’t or wouldn’t do it any more."

"It was a historic deed that preserved the liberty of our people and laid the foundations for the sustained prosperity of our socialist state."

"The world is full of the markers of abandoned empires, from Hadrian’s Wall to the Great Wall of China, from the remnants of the one in Arizona to the remnants of the one in Berlin."

"At midnight on August 13, all troops involved in the construction of the Wall are alerted. The action begins, it is supported in the hinterland by the Soviet armed forces stationed in the GDR. At 0.30 o'clock, tanks roll over the street Unter den Linden. Shortly after 1 o'clock the lights go out at the Brandenburg Gate. Armed GDR border police and members of the combat groups are positioning themselves at the demarcation border. Ghostly scenes take place: pavement is torn open in the spotlight of the military vehicles. Piles are rammed into the ground, barbed wire rolled out, tank barriers erected. The "Melodies for the Night" are running on Berliner Rundfunk. At 1:11, they are interrupted. The news anchor reads out a special message: "The Governments of the Warsaw Pact States are addressing the People's Chamber and the government of the GDR with the proposal to introduce such an order on the West Berlin border, which reliably shunts the activity of rioting against the countries of the socialist camp and around the whole area of West Berlin a reliable watch is ensured. " This informs the citizens of the GDR about what has already been going on for 71 minutes: the building of the Wall."