Quotes
Quotes about Government
The cordial agreement which exists between the governments of France and Great Britain. [Fr., La cordiale entente qui existe entre le gouvernement francais et celui de la Grande-Bretagne.]
It is from weakness that people reach for dictators and concentrated government power. Only the strong can be free. And only the productive can be strong.
Governments last as long as the undertaxed can defend themselves from the overtaxed.
Write on my gravestone: "Infidel, Traitor." --infidel to every church that compromises with wrong; traitor to every government that oppresses the people.
Write on my gravestone: "Infidel, Traitor."--infidel to every church that compromises with wrong; traitor to every government that oppresses the people.
The preservation of the sacred fire of liberty and the destiny of the republican model of government are justly considered ... deeply, ... finally, staked on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.
Over grown military establishments are under any form of government inauspicious to liberty, and are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty.
Following his brief inaugural address to the Congress, President George Washington and his party walked over to St. Paul's Church for divine services. His prayer that afternoon was: 'Almighty God, we make our earnest prayer that Thou wilt incline the hearts of the citizens to cultivate a spirit of subordination and obedience to government; to entertain a brotherly affection and love for one another and for their fellow-citizens of the United States at large.'
I go to the chair of government with feelings not unlike those of a culprit who is going to the place of his execution.
The new constitution established a president with powers unheard of in the republican United States. Some even wanted him to be king, a thought that GW found ludicrous: What astonishing changes a few years are capable of producing! I am told that even respectable characters speak of a monarchical form of government without horror. From thinking proceeds speaking, thence to acting is often but a single step. But how irrevocable and tremendous! What a triumph for the advocates of despotism to find that we are incapable of governing ourselves, and that systems founded on the basis of equal liberty are merely ideal & fallacious!
Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficent.
Violence has no constitutional sanction; and every government from the beginning has moved against it. But where grievances pile high and most of the elected spokesmen represent the Establishment, violence may be the only effective response.
It is the safeguard of the strongest that he lives under a government which is obliged to respect the voice of the weakest.
No matter who you vote for, the Government always gets in.
Democracy is a form of government that substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.
Where is it written in the Constitution that you may take children from their parents, and parents from their children, and compel them to fight the battles of any war in which the folly or wickedness of government may engage it?
If war should sweep our commerce from the seas, another generation will restore it. If war exhausts our treasury, future industry will replenish it. If war desiccate and lay waste our fields, under new cultivation they will grow green again and ripen to future harvest. If the walls of yonder Capitol should fall and its decorations be covered by the dust of battle, all these can be rebuilt. But who shall reconstruct the fabric of a demolished government; who shall dwell in the well-proportioned columns of constitutional liberty; who shall frame together the skillful architecture which unites sovereignty with state's rights, individual security with prosperity?
Our common Father and Deliverer, to whose prudence, wisdom and valour we owe our Peace, Liberty and Safety, now leads and directs in the great councils of the nation . . . and now we celebrate an independent Government--an original Constitution! an independent Legislature, at the head of which we this day celebrate, The Father of his Country--We celebrate Washington! We celebrate an independent Empire!
If we suppose a sufficient righteousness and intelligence in men to produce presently, from the tremendous lessons of history, an effective will for a world peace--that is to say, an effective will for a world law under a world government--for in no other fashion is a secure world peace conceivable--in what manner may we expect things to move towards this end? . . . It is an educational task, and its very essence is to bring to the minds of all men everywhere, as a necessary basis for world cooperation, a new telling and interpretation, a common interpretation, of history.
