Georg C. Lichtenberg Quotes
Even the best laws can only be respected and feared, not loved. Good rulers are respected, feared and loved. What mighty sources happiness for a nation good rulers are!
Georg C. Lichtenberg, 1741-1799, German Physicist & Writer, Aphorisms, 1793-1796
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
China, after overthrowing the Manchu Dynasty was struggling among many factions for control of the government. Many of the potential leaders were corrupt.
This is a remarkable quotation. Cixi attributed the great success of the Western nations and their power to their democracy, This was a time that many in England and Europe were still struggling with the degree that democracy was desirable and even in America there were many who thought American success was in spite of democracy, not because of it. Ironically, this view was rejected after Cixi by the rulers of China who concluded that heavy central rule was required to keep China stable, Sun Yat Sen and Chiang Kai Chek gave lip service to the desirability of long range democracy but maintained dictatorial rule and in Chiang’s case a very cruel and corrupt dictatorship as well. When Mao and his Communists ousted Chiang, the too rejected political democracy, and a century after this Chinese Empress pointed the way, China had still not “connected the ruled with the ruling”.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg was a German physicist, satirist, and Anglophile. As a scientist, he was the first to hold a professorship explicitly dedicated to experimental physics in Germany. He is remembered for his posthumously published notebooks, which he himself called Sudelbücher, a description modelled on the English bookkeeping term "scrapbooks", and for his discovery of tree-like electrical discharge patterns now called Lichtenberg figures.
