Government Quotes

Everything is temporary. Well, except government programs.

~ Brooke Bida

And of course the World needs more love, but we need to be clear on what form that love will take. Sometimes love requires killing its object, to put it out of its misery or protect others. Sometimes love requires incarcerating its object to protect it or others. Sometimes love requires taxing and regulating its objects to protect and serve them. Sometimes love requires helping its object to help itself. Sometimes love requires giving its object a gift. But all of these are aspects of love, not merely the last, most popular example. I send love too, and my love takes many forms. My love varies with its objects. Yes, the World needs much more love.

~ Robert Peate

If we don't learn from each others experience, we are forced to listen to people who have economic reasons to withhold critical information from us all. The other option is to wait for the government to tell us what their financial supporters want us to know.

~ Richard Diaz

But so long as I lived under a system of Government based on force and voluntarily partook of the many facilities and privileges it created for me, I was bound to help that Government to the extent of my ability when it was engaged in a war, unless I non-co-operated with the Government and renounced to the utmost of my capacity the privileges it offered me.

~ Mahatma Gandhi

The governments and their policies have failed, the church is the last hope of the common man, I value a church that is a home for all.

~ Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha

Because widespread participation is so central to popular sovereignty, we can say that the less political participation there is in a society, the weaker the democracy.

~ Edward S. Greenberg

Imagine the uproar if the Federal government tried to make everyone wear a radio transmitter around their neck so we can keep track of their movements. But people happily carry their cell phones in their purses and pockets.

~ Lee Child

In the tired hand of a dying man, Theodore Senior had written: The 'Machine politicians' have shown their colors... I feel sorry for the country however as it shows the power of partisan politicians who think of nothing higher than their own interests, and I feel for your future. We cannot stand so corrupt a government for any great length of time.

~ Edmund Morris

The modern state does not comprehend how anyone can be guided by something other than itself. In its eyes pluralism is treason.

~ Richard M. Weaver

It is contended by many that ours is a Christian government, founded upon the Bible, and that all who look upon the book as false or foolish are destroying the foundation of our country. The truth is, our government is not founded upon the rights of gods, but upon the rights of men. Our Constitution was framed, not to declare and uphold the deity of Christ, but the sacredness of humanity. Ours is the first government made by the people and for the people. It is the only nation with which the gods have had nothing to do. And yet there are some judges dishonest and cowardly enough to solemnly decide that this is a Christian country, and that our free institutions are based upon the infamous laws of Jehovah.

~ Robert G. Ingersoll

The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected.

~ G.k. Chesterton

Government should not be involved in marriage at all, I believe. There’s no reason for it. I don’t get the value of my marriage government, I get it from God. I want the government out of my life. If you want to find a church that marries a gay couple, that’s totally fine. My church does not do that and it will fundamentally change what i believe is the eternal family, the basic building block. And I have a right to believe that, and I have a right to go to a church that believes that and we have a right to practice. As long as I’m not trying to force you to do anything.

~ Glenn Beck

Yet the possibility of information storage, beyond what men and governments ever had before, can make available at the touch of a button a man's total history (including remarks put on his record by his kindergarten teacher about his ability and character). And with the computer must be placed the modern scientific technical capability which exists for wholesale monitoring of telephone, cable, Telex and microwave transmissions which carry much of today's spoken and written communications. The combined use of the technical capability of listening in on all these forms of communications with the high-speed computer literally leaves no place to hide and little room for privacy.

~ Francis A. Schaeffer

By making the government a combination of elected officials and citizen-backed initiatives and referenda, there can truly be a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

~ Victoria Stoklasa

You know something is wrong when the government declares opening someone else’s mail is a felony but your internet activity is fair game for data collecting.

~ E.a. Bucchianeri

Never underestimate the power of human stupidity, especially when it comes to bureaucrats in a government who has no clueabout money matters

~ Ziad K. Abdelnour

Scoundrels will be corrupt and unconcerned citizens apathetic under even the best constitution.

~ William Earl Maxwell

If there is any hell more unprincipled than our rulers, and we, the ruled, I feel curious to see it.

~ Henry David Thoreau

Funding for the Special Operations Network comes directly from the government. Most work is centralized, but all of the SpecOps divisions have local representatives to keep a watchful eye on any provincial problems. They are administered by local commanders, who liaise with the national offices for information exchange, guidance and policy decisions. Like any other big government department, it looks good on paper but is an utter shambles. Petty infighting and political agendas, arrogance and sheer bloody-mindedness almost guarantees that the left hand doesn't know what the right is doing.

~ Jasper Fforde

What did “good government” really mean? Langlie and his brotherhood promised an end to political corruption. (There’s no evidence that Langlie ever even took a drink, much less a bribe.) The days of “honest graft” were over, at least for a while. But seen from another perspective—that of ordinary citizens without access to Langlie and Abram’s elite network—Langlie didn’t so much end corruption as legalize it. Langlie wasn’t opposed to a government organized around the interests of the greedy; he just didn’t want to have to break the law to serve them.

~ Jeff Sharlet

We have to convince people that the handouts – just taking a few little handouts, where you have a subsistent living, where you never grow, just get a little check and a few food stamps, it will keep you on the plantation for the rest of your life, that’s not a life. That’s not living. It is not good enough. It is not acceptable. We have to educate our people that that is no longer good. You have to get off the plantation, off the government plantation

~ Elbert Guillory

The idea that blacks, or anyone for that matter, need the government to get ahead in life is despicable. And even more important, this idea is a failure. Our communities are just as poor as they’ve always been. Our schools continue to fail children. Our prisons are filled with young black men who should be at home being fathers. Our self-initiative and our self-reliance have been sacrificed in exchange for allegiance to our overseers who control us by making us dependent on them.

~ Elbert Guillory

The idea of freedom is complex and it is all-encompassing. It’s the idea that the economy must remain free of government persuasion. It’s the idea that the press must operate without government intrusion. And it’s the idea that the emails and phone records of Americans should remain free from government search and seizure. It’s the idea that parents must be the decision makers in regards to their children's education — not some government bureaucrat.But most importantly, it is the idea that the individual must be free to pursue his or her own happiness free from government dependence and free from government control. Because to be truly free is to be reliant on no one other than the author of our destiny. These are the ideas at the core of the Republican Party, and it is why I am a Republican. So my brothers and sisters of the American community, please join with me today in abandoning the government plantation and the Party of disappointment. So that we may all echo the words of one Republican leader who famously said, Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, we are free at last.

~ Elbert Guillory

Republican theory clearly stated that the people held all political power, and only they could delegate authority to a government. The people were free to change governments at will. They didn't need permission from incumbents.

~ James D. Best

The challenge has always been that good people don't know how to win elections

~ Fela Durotoye

Most young people have rebellious, anti-authoritarian impulses. They don't like being told what, when, or how to do something. It's ironic, then, that many of these same people embrace a system in which there would be far more regulations, many more bureaucrats micromanaging their lives, and far more rules and restrictions on how things can be done.

~ Glenn Beck

We must sober up and admit that too many of the Republicans and the Democrats have played us, lied to us and stolen from us, while the getaway car was driven by the media. A media that can no longer claim with a straight face the role of journalist. Journalists print the things the powerful don’t want printed. What they do is public relations. Those PR firms will not print the truth about the average American who finds himself concerned with the direction of our country today. So we must. We are not violent. We are not racist. We are not anti immigrant. We are not anti-government. And we will not be silent anymore.

~ Glenn Beck

All the horrors of the reign of terror were based on concern for public tranquility.

~ Leo Tolstoy

If you have the right to influence the laws that are made in your community, why not take the opportunity to do something good?

~ Victoria Stoklasa

We have a government of limited power under the Constitution, and we have got to work out our problems on the basis of law.

~ William Howard Taft

It may sound reactionary, I know. But we can all feel it. We've changed the way we think of ourselves as citizens. We don't think of ourselves as citizens in the old sense of being small parts of something larger and infinitely more important to which we have serious responsibilities. We do still think of ourselves as citizens in the sense of being beneficiaries--we're actually conscious of our rights as American citizens and the nation's responsibilities to us and ensuring we get our share of the American pie. We think of ourselves now as eaters of the pie instead of makers of the pie. So who makes the pie?...Something has happened where we've decided on a personal level that it's all right to abdicate our individual responsibility to the common good and let government worry about the common good while we all go about our individual self-interested business and struggle to gratify our various appetites.

~ David Foster Wallace

You have the army of mediocrities followed by the multitude of fools. As the mediocrities and the fools always form the immense majority, it is impossible for them to elect an intelligent government.

~ Guy De Maupassant

A leftist government doesn't exist because being on the left has nothing to do with governments.

~ Gilles Deleuze

Any government has as much of a duty to avoid war as a ship's captain has to avoid a shipw

~ Guy De Maupassant

Any government will work if authority and responsibility are equal and coordinate. This does not insure “good” government, it simply insures that it will work. But such governments are rare — most people want to run things, but want no part of the blame. This used to be called the “backseat driver” syndrome.

~ Robert A. Heinlein

Since governments take the right of death over their people, it is not astonishing if the people should sometimes take the right of death over governm

~ Guy De Maupassant

The peoples owe all political rights and privileges which we enjoy today in greater or lesser measure, not to the good will of their governments, but to their own strength. One need only study the history of the past three hundred years to understand by what relentless struggles every right has had to be wrested inch by inch from the despots.

~ Rudolf Rocker

It was about how men walk into a forest afraid because they know all the things that can happen. They might wake the noisy birds and cause chaos. But kids come into the trees and see the magic. They climb them and see stars that the men were too afraid to see.

~ Laura Anderson Kurk

Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the form of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question.

~ Thomas Jefferson

If you have the power to hit people over the head whenever you want, you don’t have to trouble yourself too much figuring out what they think is going on, and therefore, generally speaking, you don’t. Hence the sure-fire way to simplify social arrangements, to ignore the incredibly complex play of perspectives, passions, insights, desires, and mutual understandings that human life is really made of, is to make a rule and threaten to attack anyone who breaks it. This is why violence has always been the favored recourse of the stupid: it is the one form of stupidity to which it is almost impossible to come up with an intelligent response. It is also of course the basis of the state.

~ David Graeber