Public Disengagement Quotes

Honestly, I don't read the press. I don't know what they're saying.

The United Nations emerged as a temple of official good intentions, a place where governments might - without abating their transgressions - go to church; a place made remote - by agreed untruth and procedural complexity, and by tedium itself - from the risk of intense public involvement.

Remember, the firemen are rarely necessary. The public itself stopped reading of its own accord.

I don't think about the media.

Bureaucrats want you to think that the system is too complex because they want you to be stupid about it and uninterested in it. They work very hard to create as many levels as possible away from the simplistic government our Founding Fathers formed for one simple reason: they don't want you to know what they are doing.

We're in a dangerous phase right now where too many millions of Americans aren't listening at all to what the press tells them, and that concerns me.

Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man, the People have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions — everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses.

America is basically a hypocritical society and recognizes that hypocrisy is found throughout. The public doesn't look for politicians to tell the truth or to deliver on their promises. This country could become America the beautiful, but it never will. It's in the hands of the wrong people. And the public is so apathetic. Those who are not apathetic are dispirited, discouraged, and disheartened. Those who will sometimes feel a twitch of inspiration that would lead them to do something, they, based on their conditioning, will start to total up all the reasons why they can't succeed.

He's gone around the country stirring up apathy.

The ordinary politician has a very low estimate of human nature. In his daily life he comes into contact chiefly with persons who want to get something or to avoid something. Beyond this circle of seekers after privileges, individuals and organized minorities, he is aware of a large unorganized, indifferent mass of citizens who ask nothing in particular and rarely complain. The politician comes after a while to think that the art of politics is to satisfy the seekers after favors and to mollify the inchoate mass with noble sentiments and patriotic phrases.

More and more I think of privatisation as being not just about the takeover of resources and power by corporate interests, but as the retreat of citizens to private life and private space, screened from solidarity with strangers and increasingly afraid or even unable to imagine acting in public.

There's such an aggressively apolitical movement in the US that anything that smells of being political - even the term "political" is so ridiculous, when you think about it. The worst part of governing, the political side, is the grossest part, so that's what they call it. So anything that reeks of that immediately gets tuned out by 70 percent of the population.

Most Americans will let liberals and conservatives play their games because most Americans don't pay attention.

There's so much mudslinging going on, and people get so turned off by that. It seems like neither party is aware of that. They're too concerned with blasting each other.

I see two opposite tendencies in Turkish society: people feel demoralized, they lose the interest in politics and retreat to their private lives; or they become very angry and even more politicized, and radicalized. Both trends are troublesome.

The government is huge, stupid, greedy and makes nosy, officious and dangerous intrusions into the smallest corners of life - this much we can stand. But the real problem is that government is boring. We could cure or mitigate the other ills Washington visits on us if we could only bring ourselves to pay attention to Washington itself. But we cannot.

I dare suggest that the composer would do himself and his music an immediate and eventual service by total, resolute and voluntary withdrawal from this public world to one of private performance and electronic media.

The mass of the reading public is not interested in learning and assimilating the results of accurate investigation.

Putting it in plain terms, the general public must be reduced to its traditional apathy and obedience, and driven from the arena of political debate and action, if democracy is to survive.

Are the worst enemies of society those who attack it or those who do not even give themselves the trouble of defending it?