Government Quotes

Writing laws is easy, but governing is difficult.

~ Leo Tolstoy

The kind of man who wants the government to adopt and enforce his ideas is always the kind of man whose ideas are idiotic.

~ H.l. Mencken

To the people who are upset about their hard-earned tax money going to things they don’t like: welcome to the f*cking club. Reimburse me for the Iraq war and oil subsidies, and diaphragms are on me!

~ Jon Stewart

In a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.

~ Matt Taibbi

I find out of long experience that I admire all nations and hate all governments

~ John Steinbeck

Government does not solve problems. It subsidizes them.

~ Ronald Reagan

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.

~ Thomas Jefferson

The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield, and government to gain ground.

~ Thomas Jefferson

Government! Three fourths parasitic and the other fourth Stupid fumbling.

~ Robert A. Heinlein

I have come to the conclusion that one useless man is a disgrace, that two become a lawfirm, and that three or more become a congress. -John Adams

~ Sherman Edwards

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.

~ Adam Smith

I hope that we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.

~ Thomas Jefferson

Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught.

~ Honoré De Balzac

Anarchists did not try to carry out genocide against the Armenians in Turkey; they did not deliberately starve millions of Ukrainians; they did not create a system of death camps to kill Jews, gypsies, and Slavs in Europe; they did not fire-bomb scores of large German and Japanese cities and drop nuclear bombs on two of them; they did not carry out a ‘Great Leap Forward’ that killed scores of millions of Chinese; they did not attempt to kill everybody with any appreciable education in Cambodia; they did not launch one aggressive war after another; they did not implement trade sanctions that killed perhaps 500,000 Iraqi children.In debates between anarchists and statists, the burden of proof clearly should rest on those who place their trust in the state. Anarchy’s mayhem is wholly conjectural; the state’s mayhem is undeniably, factually horrendous.

~ Robert Higgs

I heartily accept the motto, That government is best which governs least; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe — That government is best which governs not at all; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have. Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient.

~ Henry David Thoreau

To compel a man to furnish funds for the propagation of ideas he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.

~ Thomas Jefferson

I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed, without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today – my own government.

~ Martin Luther King Jr.

Our safety, our liberty, depends upon preserving the Constitution of the United States as our fathers made it inviolate. The people of the United States are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution, but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution.

~ Abraham Lincoln

No nation has ever taxed itself into prosperity.

~ Rush Limbaugh

Surely by now there can be few here who still believe the purpose of government is to protect us from the destructive activities of corporations. At last most of us must understand that the opposite is true: that the primary purpose of government is to protect those who run the economy from the outrage of injured citizens.

~ Derrick Jensen

Democracy is worth dying for, because it's the most deeply honorable form of government ever devised by man.

~ Ronald Reagan

There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution

~ Aldous Huxley

I froze, shocked. (And don't try to claim that you did anything different the first time a government bureaucrat pulled a gun on you.)

~ Brandon Sanderson

Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose -- and you allow him to make war at pleasure. . . . If, today, he should choose to say he thinks it necessary to invade Canada to prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him? You may say to him, 'I see no probability of the British invading us'; but he will say to you, 'Be silent; I see it, if you don't.

~ Abraham Lincoln

The law is an opinion with a gun.

~ Stefan Molyneux

It didn't come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God.

~ Ray Bradbury

The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.

~ Tacitus

It is much more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones.

~ Calvin Coolidge

Good governance never depends upon laws, but upon the personal qualities of those who govern. The machinery of government is always subordinate to the will of those who administer that machinery. The most important element of government, therefore, is the method of choosing leaders.

~ Frank Herbert

There has always been, and there is now, a profound conflict of interest between the people and the government of the United States.

~ Howard Zinn

We're a government that believes in everybody having the illusion of free will.

~ Anthony Burgess

Commerce with all nations, alliance with none, should be our motto.

~ Thomas Jefferson

The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it. And even if he is not romantic personally he is very apt to spread discontent among those who are.

~ H.l. Mencken

The distrust of wit is the beginning of tyranny.

~ Edward Abbey

Democracy is not merely a form of Government. It is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience. It is essentially an attitude of respect and reverence towards our fellow men.

~ B.r. Ambedkar

In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem, government IS the problem. It isn't so much that liberals are ignorant, it's just that they know so much that isn't so.

~ Ronald Reagan

One of the strongest natural proofs of the folly of hereditary right in kings, is, that nature disapproves it, otherwise, she would not so frequently turn it into ridicule by giving mankind an ass for a lion.

~ Thomas Paine

You and I are told we must choose between a left or right, but I suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down. Up to man's age-old dream -- the maximum of individual freedom consistent with order --or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism. Regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would sacrifice freedom for security have embarked on this downward path.

~ Ronald Reagan

That is the problem with governments these days. They want to do things all the time, they are always very busy thinking of what things they can do next. That is not what people want. People want to be left alone to look after their cattle.

~ Alexander Mccall Smith

Our country is too large to have all its affairs directed by a single government. Public servants at such a distance, and from under the eye of their constituents, must, from the circumstance of distance, be unable to administer and overlook all the details necessary for the good government of the citizens; and the same circumstance, by rendering detection impossible to their constituents, will invite public agents to corruption, plunder and waste.

~ Thomas Jefferson