Leadership Quote by Gustav Heinemann

Authority hates being asked to show its work. Heinemann’s line lands with the calm steel of postwar German democracy: legitimacy isn’t inherited, it’s audited. The key move is “everywhere” - a universalizing claim that quietly demotes national exceptionalism and local custom alike. No institution gets a free pass, not the church, not the state, not the “way we’ve always done it.” That breadth turns the sentence into a moral rule for modern governance: power must survive daylight.

The subtext is pointed for a politician shaped by the collapse of Weimar and the horrors that followed. In a society where “tradition” had been weaponized as obedience and “authority” had masked complicity, questioning becomes more than a civic right; it’s a prophylactic against catastrophe. Heinemann doesn’t romanticize rebellion, though. “Justify themselves” implies an ongoing, rational obligation, not a one-time revolutionary purge. Authority can remain, tradition can remain - but only if they can answer to the public without resorting to mystique, intimidation, or nostalgia.

It also reads like a quiet rebuke to the postwar temptation to rebuild by forgetting. Questions are not a nuisance that slows recovery; they are the price of reconstruction without relapse. In an age of technocrats, culture wars, and institutional distrust, the quote still cuts: the cure isn’t blind faith or scorched-earth cynicism. It’s insisting that power explain itself - repeatedly, publicly, and in language that survives scrutiny.