Georg C. Lichtenberg Quotes

The benevolent despot who sees himself as a shepherd of the people still demands of others the submissiveness of sheep.

Religion stands, the Church blocking the sun.

To arrive at the truth in all things, we ought always to be ready to believe that what seems to us white is black if the hierarchical Church so defines it.

Turn a Christian society into an established church and it is no longer a voluntary assembly for the worship of God; it is a powerful corporation full of such sentiments and passions as usually distinguish these bodies: a dread of innovation, an attachment to abuses, a propensity to tyranny and oppression.

The possession of unlimited power will make a despot of almost any man. There is a possible Nero in the gentlest human creature that walks.

The doctrine of blind obedience and unqualified submission to any human power, whether civil or ecclesiastical, is the doctrine of despotism.

By giving the government unlimited powers, the most arbitrary rule can be made legal; and in this way a democracy may set up the most complete despotism imaginable.

Even the most humane and compassionate of the monotheisms and polytheisms are complicit in this quiet and irrational authoritarianism: they proclaim us, in Fulke Greville's unforgettable line, "Created sick Commanded to be well." And there are totalitarian insinuations to back this up if its appeal should fail.

Terror is trump. Common, brutal suppression methods are considered as sanctified laws. "Old Fighters" are holy ones. From the district leader upwards there are only Gods!

Absolute power corrupts even when exercised for humane purposes. The benevolent despot who sees himself as a shepherd of the people still demands from others the submissiveness of sheep. The taint inherent in absolute power is not its inhumanity but its anti-humanity.

A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.

When any one person or body of men seize into their hands the power in the last resort, there is properly no longer a government, but what Aristotle and his followers call the abuse and corruption of one.

Absolute power can only be supported by error, ignorance and prejudice.

A democratic despotism is like a theocracy: it assumes its own correctness.

At a distance, we cannot conceive of the authority of a despot who knows all his subjects on sight.

There are three kinds of despots. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the body. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the soul. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the soul and body alike. The first is called the Prince. The second is called the Pope. The third is called the People.

There is no King, who, with sufficient force, is not always ready to make himself absolute.

If you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him in absolute power, within a year he would be worse than the Tsar himself.

Monotheism is the primitive religion which centers human consciousness on Hive Authority. There is One God and His Name is _______ (substitute Hive-Label). If there is only One God then there is no choice, no option, no selection of reality. There is only Submission or Heresy. The word Islam means "submission". The basic posture of Christianity is kneeling. Thy will be done.

Shut up, be happy. Obey all orders without question. The happiness you have demanded is now mandatory.

I really am a pessimist. I've always felt that fascism is a more natural governmental condition than democracy. Democracy is a grace. It's something essentially splendid because it's not at all routine or automatic. Fascism goes back to our infancy and childhood, where we were always told how to live. We were told, Yes, you may do this; no, you may not do that. So the secret of fascism is that it has this appeal to people whose later lives are not satisfactory.

Power operates only destructively, bent always on forcing every manifestation of life into the straitjacket of its laws. Its intellectual form of expression is dead dogma, its physical form brute force.

They take the circuits out of people’s brains that make it possible for them to think for themselves. Their world is like the one that George Orwell depicted in his novel. I’m sure you realize that there are plenty of people who are looking for exactly that kind of brain death. It makes life a lot easier. You don’t have to think about difficult things, just shut up and do what your superiors tell you to do.

The people have nothing to do with the laws but to obey them.

Despotism, which we regard with abhorrence, is rather too plausible in decaying feudal, agrarian, pastoral societies. That's why we must expect to have many a defeat before we'll have an ultimate victory in this contest with Communism.