Salon interview (1997)
Context: I'm always astounded at the way we automatically look at what divides and separates us. We never look at what people have in common. If you see it, black and white people, both sides look to see the differences, they don't look at what they have together. Men and women, and old and young, and so on. And this is a disease of the mind, the way I see it. Because in actual fact, men and women have much more in common than they are separated.
“[Intelligence services] are poor pigs suffering from two mental illnesses: The one disease is because they never get public recognition for what they actually do. This is inevitable, as they have to work in secret. This deformes the soul. The other disease bases on the fact that they have the tendency to believe they understood the national interests of their own country much better than their own government. This latter disease is the reason that I do not trust them.”
DIE ZEIT, 30. August 2007, Zeit.de http://www.zeit.de/2007/36/Interview-Helmut-Schmidt?page=all
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Helmut Schmidt 22
Chancellor of West Germany 1974-1982 1918–2015Related quotes
Source: The Veneration of Life: Through the Disease to the Soul (1999), p. 9
“Government is a disease masquerading as its own cure.”
Financial Sense http://www.financialsense.com/fsu/editorials/steer/2007/0805.html Also quoted in “Covert Operation”, Jane Mayer, The New Yorker, (Aug. 30, 2010)
Bruesewitz v. Wyeth, 562 U.S. 223 (2011), 226.
2010s