Government Quotes

Without debate, without criticism no administration and no country can succeed and no republic can survive.

~ John F. Kennedy

Humanity lived many years and ruled the earth, sometimes wisely, sometimes well, but mostly neither.

~ Catherynne M. Valente

If you start to smell some of the shit, you start smelling all of the shit

~ Doug Stanhope

Obviously these are some exceptional young people, but what they have in common is that they were ordinary people who cared. They wanted to act, to do something, to make life better for other people—and they have.

~ Morgan Carroll

The people's government, made for the people, made by the people and answerable to the people.January 1830

~ Daniel Webster

What all these lofty and vague phrases boil down to is that the court can impose things that the voters don't want and the Constitution does not require, but which are in vogue in circles to which the court responds.

~ Thomas Sowell

No government ought to be without censors, and where the press is free no one ever will.

~ Thomas Jefferson

It is eminently possible to have a market-based economy that requires no such brutality and demands no such ideological purity. A free market in consumer products can coexist with free public health care, with public schools, with a large segment of the economy -- like a national oil company -- held in state hands. It's equally possible to require corporations to pay decent wages, to respect the right of workers to form unions, and for governments to tax and redistribute wealth so that the sharp inequalities that mark the corporatist state are reduced. Markets need not be fundamentalist.

~ Naomi Klein

To me, patriotism means dedication to the principles on which the country was founded and a willingness to stand firm and fight for these principles regardless of what the government says or does

~ Richard J. Maybury

To do what you imply would require nothing short of divine intervention. you must change man, not systems. Can you and our vapouring friends of the Literary Chamber of Rennes, or any other learned society of France, devise a system of government that has never yet been tried? Surely not. And can we say of any system tried that it proved other than failure in the end? My dear Philippe, the future is to be read with certainty only in the past. Ad actu ad posse valet consecutio. Man never changes. He is always greedy, always acquisitive, always vile. I am speaking of Man in the bulk.

~ Rafael Sabatini

Government is all show when it isn't murder in the dark ... or soldiers in the open.

~ Orson Scott Card

Hence, likewise, they will avoid the necessity of those overgrown military establishments, which, under any form of government, are inauspicious to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to Republican Liberty. In this sense it is, that your Union ought to be considered as a main prop of your liberty, and that the love of the one ought to endear to you the preservation of the other.

~ George Washington

Government can easily exist without laws, but law cannot exist without government.

~ Bertrand Russell

Did you really think we want those laws observed? said Dr. Ferris. We want them to be broken. You'd better get it straight that it's not a bunch of boy scouts you're up against... We're after power and we mean it... There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced or objectively interpreted – and you create a nation of law-breakers – and then you cash in on guilt. Now that's the system, Mr. Reardon, that's the game, and once you understand it, you'll be much easier to deal with.

~ Ayn Rand

Support for the arts -- merde! A government-supported artist is an incompetent whore!

~ Robert A. Heinlein

I have an idea about voting, how about on every ballot we include None of the above. People may laugh at that, but what that is, it is a vote of no confidence in your government and I'm willing to bet that in some elections, 'None of the Above' would win. Imagine if you won the election but lost to 'None of the Above'. Wouldn't that make you re-think your positions?

~ Jesse Ventura

The new America, instead, is fast becoming a vast ghetto in which all of us, conservatives and progressives, are being bled dry by a relatively tiny oligarchy of extremely clever financial criminals and their castrato henchmen in government, whose job is to be good actors on TV and put on a good show.

~ Matt Taibbi

Every time government attempts to handle our affairs, it costs more and the results are worse than if we had handled them ourselves.

~ Benjamin Constant

The source of our suffering has been our timidity. We have been afraid to think....Let us dare to read, think, speak, write.

~ David Mccullough

The mistake our politicians so often make with these industry leaders is in thinking they are interested in, or respectful of, the power of government. All they want is to keep stealing. If you can offer them the government’s seal of approval on that, they’ll take it. But if you can’t, well, they’ll take that too.

~ Matt Taibbi

Anarchy is like custard cooking over a flame; it has to be constantly stirred or it sticks and gets heavy, like government.

~ Tom Robbins

Our lives are led, and our decisions made, within a network of needs and wants, some natural, some arising from the acts of others, some aggravated by the acts of the state. We are all bored, or threatened, or tantalized in differing degrees by a perilous world, some hostile people, and a not very sensitive government.

~ Carl Cohen

We're supposed to strive for harmony, and that's what the art of tea is supposed to accomplish... but harmony is very, very difficult to achieve in this country. Tea ceremony is powerless. But it's also not such a bad thing either. You should enjoy it while you can.

~ Koushun Takami

Let us never weary of repeating, that to think first of the disinherited and sorrowful classes; to relieve, ventilate, enlighten, and love them; to enlarge their horizon to a magnificent extent; to lavish upon them education in every shape; to set them an example of labor, and never of indolence; to lessen the weight of the individual burden by increasing the notion of the universal aim; to limit poverty without limiting wealth; to create vast fields of public and popular activity; to have, like Briareus, a hundred hands to stretch out on all sides to the crushed and the weak; to employ the collective power in the grand task of opening workshops for every arm, schools for every aptitude, and laboratories for every intellect; to increase wages, diminish toil, and balance the debit and credit--that is to say, proportion enjoyment to effort, and supply to demand; in a word, to evolve from the social machine, on behalf of those who suffer and those who are ignorant, more light and more comfort, is (and sympathetic souls must not forget it) the first of brotherly obligations, and (let egotistic hearts learn the fact) the first of political necessities.

~ Victor Hugo

Government is the right disposition of things.

~ Michel Foucault

Crawling out of the flophouseI saw the mayor stealing my junkI doth protest, citizen's arrestNow my body's in his trunkWhere's the shadow government when you need it?Where's the shadow government?It's a bad, bad world!

~ They Might Be Giants

Have you ever stopped to ponder the amount of blood spilt, the volume of tears shed, the degree of pain and anguish endured, the number of noble men and women lost in battle so that we as individuals might have a say in governing our country?  Honor the lives sacrificed for your freedoms. Vote.

~ Richelle E. Goodrich

Strange that men, from age to age, should consent to hold their lives at the breath of another, merely that each in his turn may have a power of acting the tyrant according to the law! Oh, God! give me poverty! Shower upon me all the imaginary hardships of human life! I will receive them with all thankfulness. Turn me a prey to the wild beasts of the desert, so I be never again the victim of man, dressed in the gore-dripping robes of authority! Suffer me at least to call life, the pursuits of life, my own! Let me hold it at the mercy of the elements, of the hunger of the beasts, or the revenge of barbarians, but not of the cold-blooded prudence of monopolists and kings!

~ William Godwin

People have a hard time accepting free-market economics for the same reason they have a hard time accepting evolution: it is counterintuitive. Life looks intelligently designed, so our natural inclination is to infer that there must be an intelligent designer--a God. Similarly, the economy looks designed, so our natural inclination is to infer that we need a designer--a government. In fact, emergence and complexity theory explains how the principles of self-organization and emergence cause complex systems to arise from simple systems without a top-down designer.

~ Michael Shermer

The social organs are constituted so as to enable them to develop harmoniously in the grand air of liberty. Away, then, with quacks and organizers! Away with their rings, and their chains, and their hooks, and their pincers! Away with their artificial methods! Away with their social laboratories, their governmental whims, their centralization, their tariffs, their universities, their State religions, their inflationary or monopolizing banks, their limitations, their restrictions, their moralizations, and their equalization by taxation! And now, after having vainly inflicted upon the social body so many systems, let them end where they ought to have begun — reject all systems, and try of liberty — liberty, which is an act of faith in God and in His work

~ Frédéric Bastiat

The President and the Congress are all very well in their way. They can say what they think they think, but it rests with the Supreme Court to decide what they have really thought.

~ Theodore Roosevelt

One class. No masters. No slaves. No black. No white. No Jew. No Christian. One race-- The human race.

~ Edith Hahn Beer

It is not the function of our Government to keep the citizen from falling into error, it is the function of the citizen to keep the Government from falling into error.

~ Robert H. Jackson

The best government is that which governs least.

~ John L. O'sullivan

Folks can’t seem to realize that it isn’t a smooth talker we need in there but a steady man, a man with judgement. Any medicine-show man can spout words, if they are written for him. It takes no genius to sound well. To act right and at the right time is something else again.

~ Louis L'amour

Better to live under one tyrant a thousand miles away, than a thousand tyrants one mile away.

~ Daniel Bliss

The state was made for man, not man for state.

~ Albert Einstein

Perhaps the most important thing I learned was about democracy, that democracy is not our government, our constitution, our legal structure. Too often they are enemies of democracy.

~ Howard Zinn

In fact, if law were restricted to protecting all persons, all liberties, and all properties; if law were nothing more than the organized combination of the individual's right to self-defense; if law were the obstacle, the check, the punisher of all oppression and plunder — is it likely that we citizens would then argue much about the extent of the franchise?

~ Frédéric Bastiat

Dictatorship, by whatever name, is founded on the doctrine that the individual amounts to nothing; that the State is the only one that counts; and that men and women and children were put on earth solely for the purpose of serving the state.

~ Harry Truman