Quotes
Quotes about Government
The man who will follow precedent, but never create one, is merely an obvious example of the routineer. You find him desperately numerous in the civil service, in the official bureaus. To him government is something given as unconditionally, as absolutely as ocean or hill. He goes on winding the tape that he finds. His imagination has rarely extricated itself from under the administrative machine to gain any sense of what a human, temporary contraption the whole affair is. What he thinks is the heavens above him is nothing but the roof.
I'm proud that I'm a politician. A politician is a man who understands government, and it takes a politician to run a government. A statesman is a politician who's been dead 10 or 15 years.
All that a good government aims at...is to add no unnecessary and artificial aid to the force of its own unavoidable consequences, and to abstain from fortifying and accumulating social inequality as a means of increasing political inequalities.
A little government and a little luck are necessary in life; but only a fool trusts either of them.
The mystery of government is not how Washington works but how to make it stop.
If you are to stand up for your Government you must be able to stand up to your Government.
What is ominous is the ease with which some people go from saying that they don't like something to saying that the government should forbid it. When you go down that road, don't expect freedom to survive very long.
People are beginning to realize that the apparatus of government is costly. But what they do not know is that the burden falls inevitably on them.
The worst evils which mankind has ever had to endure were inflicted by bad governments. The state can be and has often been in the course of history the main source of mischief and disaster.
...economic history is a long record of government policies that failed because they were designed with a bold disregard for the laws of economics.
Government and state can never be perfect because they owe their raison d'etre to the imperfection of man and can attain their end, the elimination of man's innate impulse to violence, only by recourse to violence, the very thing they are called upon to prevent.
Government is beating into submission, imprisoning, and killing...The authority of man-made law is entirely due to weapons of the constables who enforce obedience to its provisions.
The feelings, sentiments, values and responses of our children, or of any citizen, are none of the government's damned business. That we must support a government agency that gives itself to the emotional and ideological manipulation of citizens is infamous.
If you have ever seen a four-year-old trying to lord it over a two-year-old, then you know what the basic problem of human nature isâand why government keeps growing larger and ever more intrusive.
What is politically defined as economic "planning" is the forcible superseding of other people's plans by government officials.
For the sake of domestic peace, liberalism aims at democratic government. Democracy is therefore not a revolutionary institution. On the contrary it is the very means of preventing revolution and civil wars. It provides a method for the peaceful adjustment of government to the will of the majority.
I personally call the type of government which can be removed without violence 'democracy,' and the other, 'tyranny.'.
I am working for the time when unqualified blacks, browns, and women join the unqualified men in running our government.
The assumption that spending more of the taxpayer's money will make things better has survived all kinds of evidence that it has made things worse. The black family- which survived slavery, discrimination, poverty, wars and depressions- began to come apart as the federal government moved in with its well-financed programs to "help.".
The crime bill passed by the Senate would reinstate the Federal death penalty for certain violent crimes: assassinating the President; hijacking an airliner; and murdering a government poultry inspector.
That government is best which governs least.
Don't steal. The government hates competition.
Crime wouldn't pay if the government ran it.
If you think of yourselves as helpless and ineffectual, it is certain that you will create a despotic government to be your master. The wise despot, therefore, maintains among his subjects a popular sense that they are helpless and ineffectual.
The more productive people are, the more governments can tax and confiscate. So the more productive people are, the more costly it is for governments to kill them. Evidence indicates that governments respond to this economic incentive.
