Government Quotes

For forms of Government let fools contest. Whate'er is best administered is best.

~ Alexander Pope

In a democracy we sometimes have to put up with things we don't life or approve of.

~ Stephen King

The State is like a great and noble steed who is tardy in his motions owing to his very size, and requires to be stirred into life. I am that gadfly which God has given the State and all day long and in all places am always fastening upon you, arousing and persuading and reproaching you. You will not easily find another like me.

~ Plato

The triune God exercises total government over all things, and He requires us as His image-bearers to exercise government in Christ in our own spheres in terms of His law.

~ Rousas John Rushdoony

For if there were a list of cosmic things that unite us, reader and writer, visible as it scrolled up into the distance, like the introduction to some epic science-fiction film, then shining brightly on that list would be the fact that we exist in a financial universe that is subject to massive gravitational pulls from states. States tug at us. States bend us. And, tirelessly, states seek to determine our orbits.

~ Mohsin Hamid

The best one can hope for is a government favorable to certain claims and demands from the Left.

~ Gilles Deleuze

The government decides to try to increase the middle class by subsidizing things that middle class people have: If middle-class people go to college and own homes, then surely if more people go to college and own homes, we’ll have more middle-class people. But homeownership and college aren’t causes of middle-class status, they’re markers for possessing the kinds of traits — self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, etc. — that let you enter, and stay, in the middle class. Subsidizing the markers doesn’t produce the traits; if anything, it undermines them.

~ Glenn Reynolds

The vast majority of administrators, at all times and in all societies, are prone to commit grievous errors if left entirely to their own devices. Hence, they should not be left to their own devices, and should be allowed to govern only in consultation with the accredited representatives of the whole community, which is one of the classical lessons of history that no nation may neglect except at its own peril.

~ Muhammad Asad

There could be nothing, he reflected, to equal a government which was simply the honest enforcement, by means of the sword, of the laws of Islam.

~ Paul Bowles

The path to a sustained victory in Afghanistan lies in improving their economy, creating jobs for the Afghanis, strengthening their government and national services, getting the provinces to trust each other and work together, and eliminating the opium trade. Previously, the United States' policy was to not get deeply involved in internal Afghani drug issues; now we've changed the policy and are actively working to eradicate the drugs. But nobody has yet to come up with a way to shut down the poppy fields and get the Afghani people back to work. Until that happens, the Taliban will inevitable creep back in.

~ Michael Delong

Moralistic culture views government as a positive force, one that values the individual but functions to the benefit of the general public. Discussion of public issues and voting are not only rights but also opportunities to better the individual and society alike. Furthermore, politicians should not profit from their public service.

~ William Earl Maxwell

The U.S. government needs to learn from successful private businesses that run an effective and efficient operation in serving their customers and outwitting their competitors.

~ Newton Lee

Our Press and our schools cultivate Chauvinism, militarism, dogmatism, conformism and ignorance. The arbitrary power of the Government is unlimited, and unexampled in history; freedom of the Press, of opinion and of movement are as thoroughly exterminated as though the proclamation of the Rights of Man had never been. We have built up the most gigantic police apparatus, with informers made a national institution, and the most refined scientific system of political and mental torture. We whip the groaning masses of the country towards a theoretical future happiness, which only we can.

~ Arthur Koestler

It is a popular delusion that the government wastes vast amounts of money through inefficiency and sloth. Enormous effort and elaborate planning are required to waste this much money.

~ P.j. O'rourke

Liberty may be gained, but can never be recovered. (Bk2:8)

~ Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Our will is always for our own good, but we do not always see what that is; the people is never corrupted, but it is often deceived... (Bk2:3)

~ Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Plato argued that good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will always find a way around law. By pretending that procedure will get rid of corruption, we have succeeded only in humiliating honest people and provided a cover of darkness and complexity for the bad people. There is a scandal here, but it's not the result of venal bureaucrats. (1994) p. 99

~ Philip K. Howard

Fit to govern? No, not fit to live.

~ William Shakespeare

Money equals power, power makes the law, and law makes government.

~ Kim Stanley Robinson

The world is ruled by cowards and cravens, brave men have put them there.

~ Damon Meredith

He’s always complaining about the fucking recession and how the government is working against people like him. He calls himself working class, which I think is a bit ironic since he doesn’t work.

~ Ida Løkås

Uniformity in the common law, consisting of broad principles like the reasonable person standard, generally permits adjustment for the circumstances. This type of uniform principle is almost synonymous with fairness. Uniform application of a detailed rule, on the other hand, will almost always favor one group over another. p. 34

~ Philip K. Howard

Wherever the real power in a Government lies, there is the danger of oppression. In our Governments the real power lies in the majority of the Community, and the invasion of private rights is chiefly to be apprehended, not from acts of Government contrary to the sense of its constituents, but from acts in which the Government is the mere instrument of the major number of the constituents.

~ James Madison

The sense that just about anything goes with the collection of public revenues and the making of public expenditure has contributed mightily to the current malaise.

~ Richard A. Epstein

The pillars of classical liberalism call for flat taxes, with revenues put to limited uses; strong property rights; and free markets.

~ Richard A. Epstein

Because we live in a democracy, and the people can't govern themselves well if they don't know the truth about the world we live in. What if our rich citizens never hear of the poverty and suffering of the rest of the city? Why should they ever give to charity or vote for reform?

~ Rosslyn Elliott

The desire to avoid short-term hardships leads to major dislocations in [housing] markets.

~ Richard A. Epstein

That effort to undermine competitive markets is no better in the market for labor than it is for goods and services.

~ Richard A. Epstein

This revolutionary idea of Western citizenship—replete with ever more rights and responsibilities—would provide superb manpower for growing legions and a legal framework that would guarantee that the men who fought felt that they themselves in a formal and contractual sense had ratified the conditions of their own battle service. The ancient Western world would soon come to define itself by culture rather than by race, skin color, or language. That idea alone would eventually bring enormous advantages to its armies on the battlefield. (p. 122)

~ Victor Davis Hanson

...men unite against none so readily as against those whom theysee attempting to rule over them.

~ Xenophon

Securing, not prohibiting, the orderly transfer of wealth from A to B, based on wealth differentials, is the raison d'être of the [New Deal programs]. The contrast between the modern progressive and classical liberal agendas could not be more explicit.

~ Richard A. Epstein

Human nature turns out to be more complicated than the idea that people will get along if only the rules are clear enough. Uncertainty, the ultimate evil that modern law seeks to eradicate, generally fosters cooperation, not the opposite.

~ Philip K. Howard

Even if these researchers do see the need to address the problem immediately, though they have obligations and legitimate interests elsewhere, including being funded for other research. With luck, the ideas discussed in Good Calories, Bad Calories may be rigorously tested in the next twenty years. If confirmed, it will be another decade or so after that, at least, before our public health authorities actively change their official explanation for why we get fat, how that leads to illness, and what we have to do to avoid or reverse those fates. As I was told by a professor of nutrition at New York University after on of my lectures, the kind of change I'm advocating could take a lifetime to be accepted.

~ Gary Taubes

What I tried to make clear in Good Calories, Bad Calories was that nutrition and obesity research lost its way after the Second World War with the evaporation of the European community of scientists and physicians that did pioneering work in those disciplines. It has since resisted all attempts to correct it. As a result, the individuals involved in this research have not only wasted decades of time, and effort, and money but have done incalculable damage along the way. Their beliefs have remained imperious to an ever-growing body of evidence that refutes them while being embraced by public-health authorities and translated into precisely the wrong advice about what to eat and, more important, what not to eat if we want to maintain a healthy weight and live a long and healthy life.

~ Gary Taubes

While the Christian faith clearly teaches that believers are to be involved as good citizens in the state, nevertheless, it is obvious why so many secularists are addicted to politics because political power is a surrogate for a Higher Power.

~ J.p. Moreland

The creators of the Constitution were not purple-robed scholars, sitting in their ivory towers attempting to put abstract theories into play, but men who had come to realize that their system of government was broken. These men desired desperately to repair it.

~ C.l. Gammon

I was born unworthy. - X-10

~ Donna Galanti

It seems that the rebels found the chaos of transition more difficult to accept than the tyranny they had known before. They joyfully welcomed back authority-even oppressive authority-for it was less painful for them than uncertainty.

~ Brandon Sanderson

Let me speak plainly: The United States of America is and must remain a nation of openness to people of all beliefs. Our very unity has been strengthened by this pluralism. That's how we began; this is how we must always be. The ideals of our country leave no room whatsoever for intolerance, anti-Semitism, or bigotry of any kind -- none. The unique thing about America is a wall in our Constitution separating church and state. It guarantees there will never be a state religion in this land, but at the same time it makes sure that every single American is free to choose and practice his or her religious beliefs or to choose no religion at all. Their rights shall not be questioned or violated by the state.-- Remarks at the International Convention of B'nai B'rith, 6 September 1984

~ Ronald Reagan

In the first place, most princes apply themselves to the arts of war, in which I have neither ability nor interest, instead of to the good arts of peace. They are generally more set on acquiring new kingdoms by hook or by crook than on governing well those that they already have.

~ Thomas More