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Quote by Ljupka Cvetanova

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The New Land

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Ljupka Cvetanova

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“We wonder why we're unable to attract to public life the calibre of people we'd like to see. Well, we pry into their private lives, put their every move under a microscope, and subject them and their loved ones to the most invasive and penetrating scrutiny imaginable. Then, when we find the slightest little thing that even remotely resembles an infraction no more serious than leaving the toilet seat up, we eat them. We get the government we deserve. Yes, we want honesty, transparency, and decency in our politicians. To attract such qualities, we need understanding, sensitivity, and sometimes forgiveness in our voters.”

“The empty self therefore becomes a political problem. An empty politician has a great deal to make up for. How will he compensate for his emptiness? The empty politician is easily drawn into a grandiose self assignment. And this must prove disastrous for society, as the promises of an empty politician are themselves empty. In fact, he brings about the opposite of what he promises. This has long been true of the totalitarian dictators. Increasingly it is true of democratically elected leaders in the West. It seems, as well, that the conflict between the totalitarian East and the consumerist West may, in the last analysis, devolve into a conflict between two types of emptiness: in the first instance, the emptiness of the characters in a Woody Allen film; in the second, the emptiness of "a boot stamping on a human face - forever.”

“It takes thousands of people to turn an illegal political order into a democratic injustice. And as it happens, a huge portion of those people are civil servants. So, if even a handful of civil servants stand strong, responsible and conscientious, then no politician has the power in his pea-brain to do injustice to the people.”