Quotes
Quotes about Government
For forms of government let fools contest;
Whate'er is best administer'd is best.
For modes of faith let graceless zealots fight;
His can't be wrong whose life is in the right.
In faith and hope the world will disagree,
But all mankind's concern is charity.
All government,--indeed, every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue and every prudent act,--is founded on compromise and barter.
And having looked to Government for bread, on the very first scarcity they will turn and bite the hand that fed them.
Equal and exact justice to all men, of whatever state or persuasion, religious or political; peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations,--entangling alliances with none; the support of the State governments in all their rights, as the most competent administrations for our domestic concerns, and the surest bulwarks against anti-republican tendencies; the preservation of the general government in its whole constitutional vigour, as the sheet anchor of our peace at home and safety abroad;...freedom of religion; freedom of the press; freedom of person under the protection of the habeas corpus; and trial by juries impartially selected,--these principles form the bright constellation which has gone before us, and guided our steps through an age of revolution and reformation.
Government is a trust, and the officers of the government are trustees; and both the trust and the trustees are created for the benefit of the people.
The very essence of a free government consists in considering offices as public trusts, bestowed for the good of the country, and not for the benefit of an individual or a party.
A power has risen up in the government greater than the people themselves, consisting of many and various and powerful interests, combined into one mass, and held together by the cohesive power of the vast surplus in the banks.
The people's government, made for the people, made by the people, and answerable to the people.
That is the best government which desires to make the people happy, and knows how to make them happy.
Free trade, one of the greatest blessings which a government can confer on a people, is in almost every country unpopular.
Nothing is so galling to a people, not broken in from the birth, as a paternal or, in other words, a meddling government, a government which tells them what to read and say and eat and drink and wear.
A conservative government is an organized hypocrisy.
You can not possibly have a broader basis for any government than that which includes all the people, with all their rights in their hands, and with an equal power to maintain their rights.
I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free.
That this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments;
And much delight of battle with my peers
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
A democracy,--that is a government of all the people, by all the people, for all the people;of course, a government of the principles of eternal justice, the unchanging law of God; for shortness' sake I will call it the idea of Freedom.
The Republican form of government is the highest form of government: but because of this it requires the highest type of human nature--a type nowhere at present existing.
For where's the state beneath the firmament
That doth excel the bees for government?
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all.
If...the machine of government...is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law.
What government is the best? That which teaches us to govern ourselves.
In times when the government imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also the prison.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
Experience teaches us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purpose is beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.
