Government Quotes

Socialism would gather all power tothe supreme party and party leaders,rising like stately pinnaclesabove their vast bureaucracies ofcivil servants no longer servants, no longer civil.

Politics is not a game. It is an earnest business.

Our constitution protects aliens, drunks and U.S. Senators.

As the government is, such will be the man.

Government's first duty and highest obligation is public safety.

The federal government is our servant, not our master.

The marvel of all history is the patience with which men and women submit to burdens unnecessarily laid upon them by their governments.

A Prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded.

There are only two economists in Congress and hundreds of lawyers. Does that explain why the government is in such a mess?

The Government of the United States would be constrained to hold the Imperial German government to a strict accountability for such acts of their naval authorities.

Democracy, if it is reasonable, limits itself to giving everyone an equal opportunity to compete and to obtain.

The Government is responsible for what is happening to black people in America.

A nation can survive its fools, even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within....for the traitor appears not to be a traitor...he rots the soul of a nation...he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist.

Through systematic terror, through indoctrination, through systematic manipulation of stimulus, reward, and punishment, we can today break man and convert him into brute animal... The first step toward survival is therefore to make government legitimate again by attempting to deprive it of these powers... by international action to ban such powers.

Everything the State says is a lie, and everything it has it has stolen.

Advisers advise, and ministers decide.

What country can preserve its liberties if its rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms.

Up against the corporate government, voters find themselves asked to choose between look-alike candidates from two parties vying to see who takes the marching orders from their campaign paymasters and their future employers. The money of vested interest nullifies genuine voter choice and trust.

What at first was plunder assumed the softer name of revenue.

Statesmen and legislators, standing so completely within the institution, never distinctly and nakedly behold it. They speak of moving society, but they have no resting-place without it. They may be men of a certain experience and discrimination, and have no doubt invented ingenious and even useful systems, for which we sincerely thank them; but all their wit and usefulness lie within certain not very wide limits. They are wont to forget that the world is not governed by policy and expediency.

No business is above Government; and Government must be empowered to deal adequately with any business that tries to rise above Government.

It is not a sign of communal well-being when men turn to their government to execute all their business for them, but rather a sign of decay, as in the United States today. The state, indeed, is but one of the devices that a really healthy community sets up to manage its affairs.

I join cordially in admiring and revering the Constitution of the United States, the result of the collected wisdom of our country. That wisdom has committed to us the important task of proving by example that a government, if organized in all its parts on the Representative principle unadulterated by the infusion of spurious elements, if founded, not in the fears & follies of man, but on his reason, on his sense of right, on the predominance of the social over his dissocial passions, may be so free as to restrain him in no moral right, and so firm as to protect him from every moral wrong.

Our way of getting an army able to fight the German army is to declare war on Germany just as if we had such an army, and then trust to the appalling resultant peril and disaster to drive us into wholesale enlistment.

If the governments devalue the currency in order to betray all creditors, you politely call this procedure 'inflation'.

Government is best which governs least

Ours is a government of liberty by, through, and under the law.A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be great or a democracy.

No man with a genius for legislation has appeared in America. They are rare in the history of the world. There are orators, politicians, and eloquent men, by the thousand; but the speaker has not yet opened his mouth to speak who is capable of settling the much-vexed questions of the day. We love eloquence for its own sake, and not for any truth which it may utter, or any heroism it may inspire. Our legislators have not yet learned the comparative value of free trade and of freedom, of union, and of rectitude, to a nation.

I think it is the most important subject facing this country, but I cannot get any of my ministers to take any notice.

Our national debt after all is an internal debt owed not only by the Nation but to the Nation. If our children have to pay interest on it they will pay that interest to themselves. A reasonable internal debt will not impoverish our children or put the Nation into bankruptcy.

The right is more precious than peace.

Elections should be held on April 16th- the day after we pay our income taxes. That is one of the few things that might discourage politicians from being big spenders.

Do something, Congress. Do anything.

Civil servants and priests, soldiers and ballet-dancers, schoolmasters and police constables, Greek museums and Gothic steeples, civil list and services list -- the common seed within which all these fabulous beings slumber in embryo is taxation.

A government which uses force to maintain its rule teaches the oppressed to use force to oppose it.

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

Lighting that torch in Atlanta didn't make me nervous. Standing up to the government - that made me nervous.

Schools and colleges are really a factory for turning out clerks for the Government.

A constitution should be framed so as not to impede the action of government, nor force the government to its violation.

Prohibition... goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man's appetite by legislation and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes... A prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded.

Yet by such worthless beings is a great nation to be governed and even made to deify their old king because he is only a fool and a maniac, and to forgive and forget his having lost to them a great and flourishing empire.

There is something to be said for government by a great aristocracy which has furnished leaders to the nation in peace and war for generations; even a Democrat like myself must admit this.

If once the people become inattentive to the public affairs, you and I, and Congress and Assemblies, Judges and Governors, shall all become wolves. It seems to be the law of our general nature, in spite of individual exceptions.

I hold it that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms are in the physical. Unsuccessful rebellions, indeed, generally establish the encroachments on the rights of the people, which have produced them. An observation of this truth should render honest republican governors so mild in their punishment of rebellions, as not to discourage them too much. It is medicine necessary for the sound health of government.

No government is ever really in favor of so-called civil rights. It always tries to whittle them down. They are preserved under all governments, insofar as they survive at all, by special classes of fanatics, often highly dubious.

The only stable principle of government is equality according to proportion, and for every man to enjoy his own.

The taxpayer - that's someone who works for the federal government but doesn't have to take the civil service examination.

Republican despotism is more fertile in acts of tyranny, because everyone has a hand in it.

The only greater [evil] than separation... [is] living under a government of discretion.

[Write to your congressional representative against the health care reform proposal or] we will awake to find that we have socialism.

Although there are some parallels to the problems that we're seeing now and what we say back in the '30s, no period is exactly the same. For us to simply recreate what existed back in the '30s in the 21st century, I think would be missing the boat. We've gotta come up with solutions that are true to our times and true to this moment. And that's gonna be our job. I think the basic principle that government has a role to play in kick starting an economy that has ground to a halt is sound.

Bind them down by the chains of the Constitution where they can do no mischief.

Should my administration prove to be a very wicked one...or a very foolish one, if you, the people, are true to yourselves and the Constitution, there is little harm I can do, thank God.

An oppressive government is more to be feared than a tiger.

Your profits are going to be cut down to a reasonably low level by taxation. Your income will be subject to higher taxes. Indeed in these days, when every available dollar should go to the war effort, I do not think that any American citizen should have a net income in excess of $25,000 per year after payment of taxes.

The true forms of government, therefore, are those in which the one, or the few, or the many, govern with a view to the common interest; but governments which rule with a view to the private interest, whether of the one or of the few, or of the many, are perversions. For the members of a state, if they are truly citizens, ought to participate in its advantages.

As government grows, freedom recedes.

We do not believe that if you cut back what government does you diminish its authority. On the contrary, a government that did less, and therefore did better, would strengthen its authority.

Democracy is an awful way to run a country, but it's the best system we have.

Why the transfer of decisions from those with personal experience and a stake in the outcome to those with neither can be expected to lead to better decisions is a question seldom asked, much less answered.