Otto von Bismarck: State

Otto von Bismarck was German statesman, Chancellor of Germany. Explore interesting quotes on state.
Otto von Bismarck: 70   quotes 31   likes

“There is a special providence for drunkards, fools, and the United States of America.”

Otto von Bismarck

This saying appears as early as 1849 in the form "the special providence over the United States and little children", attributed to Abbé Correa. There is no good evidence that Bismarck ever repeated it. See talk page for more details.
Misattributed

Fools

“The interests of the state alone have guided me, and it has been a calumny when publicists, even well-meaning, have accused me of having ever advocated an aristocratic system. I have never regarded birth as a substitute for want of ability; whenever I have come forward on behalf of landed property, it has not been in the interests of proprietors of my own class, but because I see in the decline of agriculture one of the greatest dangers to our permanence as a state. The ideal that has always floated before me has been a monarchy which should be so far controlled by an independent national representation—according to my notion, representing classes or callings—that monarch or parliament would not be able to alter the existing statutory position before the law separately but only communi consensu; with publicity, and public criticism, by press and Diet, of all political proceedings.”

Otto von Bismarck

Volume I, pp. 17–18
Bismarck: The Man and the Statesman

Birth , Law

“The social insecurity of the worker is the real cause of their being a perishable to the state.”

Otto von Bismarck

Speech to the Landtag (18 October 1849), quoted in Henry E. Sigerist, 'From Bismarck to Beveridge: Developments and Trends in Social Security Legislation', Journal of Public Health Policy, Vol. 20, No. 4 (1999), p. 484
1840s

“If we really came to a position in which we could no longer produce the grain which we must necessarily consume, then in what state would we be if in wartime we had no Russian grain imports and perhaps simultaneously were blockaded along our coasts – in other words, if we had no grain at all?”

Otto von Bismarck

Source: Speech to the Reichstag advocating protective tariffs, quoted in Paul Kennedy, The Rise of the Anglo-German Antagonism, 1860–1914 (1980), p. 51

“Every state must be aware that its peace, its security rests on its own sword.”

Otto von Bismarck

All the King's Men' A search for the colonial ideas of some advisers and "accomplices" of Leopold II (1853-1892). (Hannes Vanhauwaert), 5. A prospectus by the military Chazal and Brialmont, The military centipede Henri-Alexis Brialmont (1821-1893) http://www.ethesis.net/leopold_II/leopold_II.htm#2.%20 CROKAERT, P. Brialmont, 183.
Undated

Peace