Politics & Power Quote by Shimon Peres

Peres frames a whole theory of modern governance as a triangle of mutual suspicion, and he does it with the dry efficiency of someone who spent decades herding rival power centers into the same room. Industry and unions, supposed enemies, suddenly become an accidental coalition in his telling: they may fight each other, but they share a low-grade contempt for the state. That inversion is the hook. It turns class conflict into a bipartisan eye-roll aimed upward, at the institution tasked with refereeing both.

Calling government a "talking organization and a spending organization" lands because it uses the language of management to diminish the mystique of politics. "Talking" suggests meetings without outcomes, rhetoric without delivery; "spending" suggests redistribution without productivity. Peres isn’t offering a libertarian dunk so much as describing the reputational problem of democratic states in an era when the private and organized-labor spheres can point to tangible outputs: goods produced, contracts negotiated, wages won. Government, by contrast, produces legitimacy, stability, and rules - invisible products that only become obvious when they fail.

The subtext is pragmatic, not ideological. Peres is signaling why statesmen must translate policy into trust, and why grand national projects require more than budgets and speeches. Coming from an Israeli leader shaped by perpetual security strain and ambitious state-building, the line reads as a warning: if government is perceived only as a microphone and a checkbook, it loses the authority needed to broker sacrifice, manage conflict, and make long-term bets.