“[The Soviet government] is the most realistic regime in the world — no ideals.”
Source: https://books.google.com.ar/books?id=WWMHAQAAQBAJ&pg=PA132&dq=%5BThe+Soviet+government%5D+is+the+most+realistic+regime+in+the+world+%E2%80%94+no+ideals.&hl=es-419&sa=X&ei=YpSgVOShKoyogwT9loTIAg&ved=0CBMQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%5BThe%20Soviet%20government%5D%20is%20the%20most%20realistic%20regime%20in%20the%20world%20%E2%80%94%20no%20ideals.&f=false
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Golda Meir 38
former prime minister of Israel 1898–1978Related quotes
Source: Two Hundred Million Americans in Search of a Government (1969), p. 116

As quoted in Cnaan Liphshiz. Obama ‘chickened out’ of confronting mullahs http://www.jpost.com/LandedPages/PrintArticle.aspx?id=272989. The Jerusalem Post. July 6, 2012.
Interviews, 2012

“Governments do not make ideals, but ideals make governments.”
1920s, Speech on the Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence (1926)
Context: Governments do not make ideals, but ideals make governments. This is both historically and logically true. Of course the government can help to sustain ideals and can create institutions through which they can be the better observed, but their source by their very nature is in the people. The people have to bear their own responsibilities. There is no method by which that burden can be shifted to the government. It is not the enactment, but the observance of laws, that creates the character of a nation.

1990s, On My Country and the World (1999)

Weggefährten - Erinnerungen und Reflexionen, Siedler-Verlag Berlin 1996, S. 54, ISBN 9783442755158, ISBN 978-3442755158

Audio lectures, Decadence and the New Age (March 10, 1989)
Source: Becoming Hitler: The Making of a Nazi (2017), pp. 46-47