Government Quotations

Guest Author - Danielle Hollister

"A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. "
--Edward Abbey
"In the Soviet Union, government controls industry. In the United States, industry controls government. That is the principal structural difference between the two great oligarchies of our time."
-- Edward Abbey
"We must develop a fair appreciation for the real strengths and limitations of government effort on behalf of children. Government, obviously, cannot fill a child's emotional needs. Nor can it fill his spiritual and moral needs. Government is not a father or mother. Government has never raised a child, and it never will."
-- William J. Bennett
"The marvel of all history is the patience with which men and women submit to burdens unnecessarily laid upon them by their governments."
-- William H. Borah
"By definition, a government has no conscience, sometimes it has a policy, but nothing more."
--Albert Camus
"Every time I hear a political speech or I read those of our leaders, I am horrified for having, for years, heard nothing which sounded human. It is always the same words telling the same lies. And the fact that men accept this, that the people's anger has not destroyed these hollow clowns, strikes me as proof that men attribute no importance to the way they are governed; that they gamble yes, gamble with a whole part of their life and their so called "vital interests." "
-- Albert Camus
"I'm completely in favor of the separation of Church and State. My idea is that these two institutions screw us up enough on their own, so both of them together is certain death. "
-- George Carlin
"...dissent, protest, pressures of a wide variety that escape elite control can modify the calculus of costs of planners, and offer a slight hope that Washington can be compelled to permit at least some steps towards 'justice, freedom and democracy' within its domains. "
-- Avram Noam Chomsky
"Dictators ride to and fro upon tigers which they dare not dismount. And the tigers are getting hungry."
-- Winston Churchill
"The United States has a government, security organizations and allies. The Soviet Union, however, has a regime, secret police and satellites. Our leaders are consummate politicians; their are wily, cunning or worse. We give the world information and seek influence; they disseminate propaganda and disinformation while seeking expansion and domination."
-- Stephen Cohen
"You can only govern men by serving them. The rule is without exception."
-- Victor Cousin
"Whoever in discussion adduces authority uses not intellect but memory."
-- Leonardo da Vinci
"How can you govern a country which has 246 varieties of cheese?"
--Charles De Gaulle
"Colonies do not cease to be colonies because they are independent."
-- Benjamin Disraeli
"Our best protection against bigger government in Washington is better government in the states. "
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower
"The government deficit is the difference between the amount of money the government spends and the amount it has the nerve to collect."
--Sam Ewing
"A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take from you everything you have. "
-- Gerald Rudolph Ford
"[T]he ultimate touchstone of constitutionality is the Constitution itself and not what we have said about it. "
-- Felix Frankfurter
"Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program."
-- Milton Friedman
"Governments never learn. Only people learn. "
-- Milton Friedman
"And who can doubt that it will lead to the worst disorders when minds created free by God are compelled to submit slavishly to an outside will? When we are told to deny our senses and subject them to the will of others? When people devoid of whatsoever competence are made judges over experts and are granted authority to treat them as they please? These are the novelties which are apt to bring about the ruin of commonwealths and the subversion of the state. "
-- Galileo Galilei
"Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite."
-- John Kenneth Galbraith
"A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away. "
-- Barry Goldwater
"Why has government been instituted at all? Because the passions of man will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint."
-- Alexander Hamilton
"I believe and I say it is true Democratic feeling, that all the measures of the Government are directed to the purpose of making the rich richer and the poor poorer."
-- William Henry Harrison
"The best political weapon is the weapon of terror. Cruelty commands respect. Men may hate us. But, we don't ask for their love; only for their fear. "
-- Heinrich Himmler
"So long as governments set the example of killing their enemies, private individuals will occasionally kill theirs. "
--Elbert Hubbard
"Never trust a government that doesn't trust its own citizens with guns. "
--Thomas Jefferson
"The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground. "
-- Thomas Jefferson
"I contemplate with sovereign reverence the act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between church and state."
-- Thomas Jefferson
"Let your voice be heard, whether or not it is to the taste of every jack in office who may be obstructing the traffic. By all means, render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's ~ but this does not necessarily include everything that he says is his. "
-- Denis Johnston
"I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the president who might appoint him or the people who might elect him."
-- John Fitzgerald Kennedy
"A popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives."
-- James Madison
"Public opinion sets bounds to every government, and is the real sovereign in every free one."
-- James Madison
"In truth, there never was any remarkable lawgiver amongst any people who did not resort to divine authority, as otherwise his laws would not have been accepted by the people; for there are many good laws, the importance of which is known to be the sagacious lawgiver, but the reasons for which are not sufficiently evident to enable him to persuade others to submit to them; and therefore do wise men, for the purpose of removing this difficulty, resort to divine authority. "
-- Niccolo Machiavelli
"I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time. "
--H. L. Mencken
"The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out...without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable. "
--H. L. Mencken
"Annual drug deaths: tobacco: 395,000, alcohol: 125,000, 'legal' drugs: 38,000, illegal drug overdoses: 5,200, marijuana: 0. Considering government subsidies of tobacco, just what is our government protecting us from in the drug war? "
--Ralph Nader
"...But when he [the people's champion] has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty, and there is nothing to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader."
-- Plato
"Do you not know, my son, with what little understanding the world is ruled? "
-- Pope Julius III
"Once a ruler becomes religious, it [becomes] impossible for you to debate with him. Once someone rules in the name of religion, your lives become hell. "
-- Colonel MoammarQaddafi
"Can government really be active and, at the same time, limited? History suggests otherwise."
--Lew Rockwell
"If we do not halt this steady progress of building commissions and regulatory bodies and special legislation like huge inverted pyramids over every one of the simple constitutional provisions, we shall soon be spending many billions of dollars more. "
-- Franklin Delano Roosevelt
"One must respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny. "
-- Bertrand Russell
"The art of government is the organization of idolatry. "
-- George Bernard Shaw
"A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend upon the support of Paul. "
--George Bernard Shaw
"In a country where the sole employer is the State, opposition means death by slow starvation. The old principle: Who does not work does not eat, has been replaced by a new one: Who does not obey shall not eat. "
-- Leon Trotsky
"A Russian should rejoice if Poland, the Baltic Provinces, Finland, Armenia, should be separated, freed from Russia; so with an Englishman in regard to Ireland, India and other possessions; and each should help to do this, because the greater the state, the more wrong and cruel is its patriotism, and the greater is the sum of suffering upon which its power is founded. Therefore, if we really wish to be what we profess to be, we must not only cease our present desire for the growth of the state, but we must desire its decrease, its weakening, and help this forward with all our might. "
-- Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy
"Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear. "
--Harry S. Truman
"Monarchies, aristocracies, and religions are all based upon that large defect in your race the individual's distrust of his neighbor, and his desire, for safety's or comfort's sake, to stand well in his neighbor's eye. These institutions will always remain, and always flourish, and always oppress you, affront you, and degrade you, because you will always be and remain slaves of minorities. There was never a country where the majority of people were in their secret hearts loyal to any of these institutions."
-- Mark Twain
"It is impossible rightly to govern the world without God and the Bible. "
--Unknown
"It has been the scheme of the Christian Church, and of all the other invented systems of religion, to hold man in ignorance of the Creator, as it is of Governments to hold man in ignorance of his rights. The systems of the one are as false as those of the other, and are calculated for mutual support. "
-- Unknown
"Government employees (Bureaucrats) like to solve problems. If there are no problems handily available, they will create their own problems."
--George Van Valkenburg
"Man creates problems. Government and bureaucrats magnify them 100 times. "
--George Van Valkenburg
"Whether you have an abortion, what you put in your own body, with whom you have sex these are _not_ the affairs of the state. A government does not exist to control the citizens. When it does, it is a tyranny, and must be fought. The tree of liberty, Jefferson warned us, must be refreshed with the blood of tyrants andpatriots. "
-- Gore Vidal
"It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong. "
-- Voltaire
"Government is not reason. Government is not eloquence. It is force. And, like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master. "
--George Washington
"If you want to understand your government, don't begin by reading the Constitution. It conveys precious little of the flavor of today's statecraft. Instead, read selected portions of the Washington telephone directory containing listings for all the organizations with titles beginning with the word "National". "
-- George F. Will
"Liberty has never come from the government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of government. The history of liberty is the history of resistance. The history of liberty is a history of the limitation of governmental power, not the increase of it. "
--Woodrow Wilson
"Internet publishing can be more powerful than print journalism, given its immediacy and lack of corporate or governmental filters."
--Dave Winer
"What all of this indicates is that despite the Constitution, despite the First Amendment and its guarantees of free speech, American citizens must fear to speak their minds, knowing that their speech, their writings, their attendance of meetings, their signing of petitions, and their support of even the most nonviolent of organizations may result in their being listed in the files of the FBI, with consequences no one can surely know. It was Mark Twain who said, 'In our country, we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either.' "
-- Howard Zinn

The Declaration of Indepe...

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