Attention Passive Citizens of the Homeland: Here's the Friday Quote of the Week for Big Brass Alliance Week via Fritz Stern

Here's the quote of the day from my morning reading. It seemed appropriate for this week of intensive Downing Street Memo blogging:

...the wars and revolutions of our time have been made possible not so much by a few leaders or sects as by the multitude of passive citizens who smugly thought that politics was the responsibility of statesmen.

-- Fritz Stern, The Failure of Illiberalism:
Essays on the Political Culture of Modern Germany
[New York: Knopf, 1972, p. 146]