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Government QuotesFamous Government quotes by popular authors such as Ronald Reagan, Thomas Jefferson, Will Rogers, Daniel Webster, Henry Mencken and others.
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[highlight-text]Every government is a scoundrel.
Henry Mencken
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[highlight-text]Democracy is an abuse of statistics.
Jorge Luis Borges
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[highlight-text]To rule is easy to govern difficult.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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[highlight-text]You don't pay taxes - they take taxes.
Chris Rock
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[highlight-text]As government expands liberty contracts.
Ronald Reagan
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[highlight-text]The essence of good government is trust.
Kathleen Sebelius
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[highlight-text]The safety of the State is the highest law.
Justinian
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[highlight-text]The government is best which governs least.
Thomas Jefferson
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[highlight-text]That government is best which governs least.
Thomas Paine
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[highlight-text]Talk is cheap - except when Congress does it.
Cullen Hightower
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[highlight-text]Every nation has the government that it deserves.
Joseph De Maistre
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[highlight-text]I think the best possible social program is a job.
Ronald Reagan
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[highlight-text]If men were angels no government would be necessary.
James Madison
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[highlight-text]How lucky for those in power that people don't think.
Adolf Hitler
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[highlight-text]In this world nothing is certain but death and taxes.
Benjamin Franklin
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[highlight-text]No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size.
Ronald Reagan
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[highlight-text]When dictatorship is a fact revolution becomes a right.
Victor Hugo
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[highlight-text]It's not the voting that's democracy; it's the counting.
Tom Stoppard
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[highlight-text]Once abolish the God and the government becomes the God.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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[highlight-text]History in general only informs us what bad government is.
Thomas Jefferson
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[highlight-text]An oppressive government is more to be feared than a tiger.
Confucius
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[highlight-text]Let the people think they govern and they will be governed.
William Penn
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[highlight-text]The worst thing in this world next to anarchy is government.
Henry Ward Beecher
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[highlight-text]Democracy gives every man the right to be his own oppressor.
James Russell Lowell
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[highlight-text]Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
Henry Mencken
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[highlight-text]Laws too gentle are seldom obeyed; too severe seldom executed.
Benjamin Franklin
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[highlight-text]Laws are like sausages it is better not to see them being made.
Otto von Bismarck
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[highlight-text]The nation which forgets its defenders will be itself forgotten.
Calvin Coolidge
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[highlight-text]Be thankful we're not getting all the government we're paying for.
Will Rogers
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[highlight-text]We make a living by what we get but we make a life by what we give.
Norman MacEwan
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[highlight-text]An unlimited power to tax involves necessarily the power to destroy.
Daniel Webster
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[highlight-text]In the absence of justice what is sovereignty but organized robbery?
Saint Augustine
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[highlight-text]I don't make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts.
Will Rogers
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[highlight-text]Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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[highlight-text]If 'pro' is the opposite of 'con' what is the opposite of 'progress'?
Paul Harvey
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[highlight-text]Government is not a solution to our problem government is the problem.
Ronald Reagan
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[highlight-text]Here is my first principle of foreign policy: good government at home.
William E. Gladstone
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[highlight-text]The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem.
Milton Friedman
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[highlight-text]Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants.
Edmund Burke
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[highlight-text]Govern a great nation as you would cook a small fish. (Don't overdo it.)
Lao-Tzu
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[highlight-text]I didn't come to Washington to be loved and I haven't been disappointed.
Phil Gramm
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[highlight-text]How can you be expected to govern a country that has 246 kinds of cheese?
Charles de Gaulle
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[highlight-text]No man is good enough to govern another man without that other's consent.
Abraham Lincoln
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[highlight-text]The best defense against usurpatory government is an assertive citizenry.
William F. Buckley
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[highlight-text]The most dangerous moment for a bad government is when it begins to reform.
Alexis de Tocqueville
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[highlight-text]Freedom of opinion can only exist when the government thinks itself secure.
Bertrand Russell
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[highlight-text]There are three species of government: republican monarchical and despotic.
Charles de Secondat
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[highlight-text]Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.
Henry Mencken
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[highlight-text]The act of policing is in order to punish less often to punish more severely.
Napoleon Bonaparte
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[highlight-text]The prosperity of a country can be seen simply in how it treats its old people.
Nachman of Bratslav
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[highlight-text]No government can love a child and no policy can substitute for a family's care.
Hillary Clinton
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[highlight-text]The best minds are not in government. If any were business would steal them away.
Ronald Reagan
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[highlight-text]The difference in golf and government is that in golf you can't improve your lie.
George Deukmejian
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[highlight-text]The contest for ages has been to rescue liberty from the grasp of executive power.
Daniel Webster
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[highlight-text]A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.
George Bernard Shaw
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[highlight-text]It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.
Thomas Jefferson
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[highlight-text]Whenever the people are well-informed they can be trusted with their own government.
Thomas Jefferson
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[highlight-text]But let us remember at the same time government is sacred and not to be trifled with.
Jonathan Mayhew
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[highlight-text]Though the people support the government the government should not support the people.
Grover Cleveland
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[highlight-text]Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.
John F. Kennedy
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[highlight-text]A government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we'll ever see on this earth.
Ronald Reagan
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[highlight-text]Both oligarch and tyrant mistrust the people and therefore deprive them of their arms.
Aristotle
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[highlight-text]Peace commerce and honest friendship with all nations; entangling alliances with none.
Thomas Jefferson
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[highlight-text]The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.
Winston Churchill
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[highlight-text]Where there is a lack of honor in government the morals of the whole people are poisoned.
Herbert Hoover
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[highlight-text]Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.
P. J. O'Rourke
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[highlight-text]The great nations have always acted like gangsters and the small nations like prostitutes.
Stanley Kubrick
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[highlight-text]To cure the British disease with socialism was like trying to cure leukaemia with leeches.
Margaret Thatcher
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[highlight-text]Every government is a parliament of whores. The trouble is in a democracy the whores are us.
P. J. O'Rourke
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[highlight-text]Democracy is direct self-government over all the people for all the people by all the people.
Theodore Parker
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[highlight-text]The history of liberty is a history of limitation of government power not the increase of it.
Woodrow Wilson
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[highlight-text]Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.
Denis Diderot
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[highlight-text]The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern: every class is unfit to govern.
Lord Acton
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[highlight-text]I believe that all government is evil and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time.
Henry Mencken
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[highlight-text]Government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one.
Thomas Paine
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[highlight-text]A little government and a little luck are necessary in life but only a fool trusts either of them.
P. J. O'Rourke
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[highlight-text]For in reason all government without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery.
Jonathan Swift
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[highlight-text]I would like to electrocute everyone who uses the word 'fair' in connection with income tax policies.
William F. Buckley
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[highlight-text]Socialism: An attempt to curb the destructive power of monopolies by creating the biggest one of all.
Author Unknown
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[highlight-text]From such beginnings of governments what could be expected but a continual system of war and extortion?
Thomas Paine
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[highlight-text]Government does not tax to get the money it needs; government always finds a need for the money it gets.
Ronald Reagan
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[highlight-text]The mistakes made by Congress wouldn't be so bad if the next Congress didn't keep trying to correct them.
Cullen Hightower
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[highlight-text]This country has come to feel the same when Congress is in session as when the baby gets hold of a hammer.
Will Rogers
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[highlight-text]Washington is a place where politicians don't know which way is up and taxes don't know which way is down.
Robert Orben
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[highlight-text]A man may be loyal to his government and yet oppose the particular principles and methods of administration.
Abraham Lincoln
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[highlight-text]Outside of its legitimate function government does nothing as well or as economically as the private sector.
Ronald Reagan
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[highlight-text]Ancient Rome declined because it had a Senate now what's going to happen to us with both a House and a Senate?
Will Rogers
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[highlight-text]Experience teaches us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficient.
Louis D. Brandeis
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[highlight-text]I'm tired of hearing it said that democracy doesn't work. Of course it doesn't work. We are supposed to work it.
Alexander Woollcott
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[highlight-text]So long as governments set the example of killing their enemies private individuals will occasionally kill theirs.
Elbert Hubbard
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[highlight-text]Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.
George Washington
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[highlight-text]The basis of our political systems is the right of the people to make and to alter their constitutions of government.
George Washington
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[highlight-text]Democracy is the only system that persists in asking the powers that be whether they are the powers that ought to be.
Sydney J. Harris
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[highlight-text]It is hard to feel individually responsible with respect to the invisible processes of a huge and distant government.
John W. Gardner
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[highlight-text]When we got into office the thing that surprised me the most was that things were as bad as we'd been saying they were.
John F. Kennedy
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[highlight-text]I think we have more machinery of government than is necessary too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious.
Thomas Jefferson
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[highlight-text]Themistocles said 'The Athenians govern the Greeks; I govern the Athenians; you my wife govern me; your son governs you.'
Plutarch
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[highlight-text]Are you entitled to the fruits of your labor or does government have some presumptive right to spend and spend and spend?
Ronald Reagan
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[highlight-text]People try to live within their income so they can afford to pay taxes to a government that can't live within its income.
Robert Half
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[highlight-text]Government is like a baby. An alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.
Ronald Reagan
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[highlight-text]A house divided against itself cannot stand - I believe this government cannot endure permanently half-slave and half-free.
Abraham Lincoln
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[highlight-text]A conference is a gathering of important people who singly can do nothing but together can decide that nothing can be done.
Fred Allen
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[highlight-text]The liberties of a people never were nor ever will be secure when the transactions of their rulers may be concealed from them.
Patrick Henry
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[highlight-text]Every step we take towards making the State our Caretaker of our lives by that much we move toward making the State our Master.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
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[highlight-text]Government consists in nothing else but so controlling subjects that they shall neither be able to nor have cause to do it harm.
Nicolo Machiavelli
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[highlight-text]No nation keeps its word. A nation is a big blind worm following what? Fate perhaps. A nation has no honor it has no word to keep.
Carl Jung
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[highlight-text]Today we can declare: Government is not the problem and government is not the solution. We the American people we are the solution.
Bill Clinton
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[highlight-text]Nations crumble from within when the citizenry asks of government those things which the citizenry might better provide for itself.
Ronald Reagan
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[highlight-text]A corporation's primary goal is to make money. Government's primary role is to take a big chunk of that money and give it to others.
Larry Ellison
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[highlight-text]Socialism is a philosophy of failure the creed of ignorance and the gospel or envy its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.
Winston Churchill
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[highlight-text]There are men in all ages who mean to govern well but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters but they mean to be masters.
Daniel Webster
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[highlight-text]The marvel of all history is the patience with which men and women submit to burdens unnecessarily laid upon them by their governments.
George Washington
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[highlight-text]There is no kind of dishonesty into which otherwise good people more easily and frequently fall than that of defrauding the government.
Benjamin Franklin
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[highlight-text]Ohio claims they are due a president as they haven't had one since Taft. Look at the United States they have not had one since Lincoln.
Will Rogers
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[highlight-text]To hear some men talk of the government you would suppose that Congress was the law of gravitation and kept the planets in their places.
Wendell Phillips
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[highlight-text]The will of the people is the only legitimate foundation of any government and to protect its free expression should be our first object.
Thomas Jefferson
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[highlight-text]Governments exist to protect the rights of minorities. The loved and the rich need no protection - they have many friends and few enemies.
Wendell Phillips
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[highlight-text]Our destruction should it come at all will be from another quarter. From the inattention of the people to the concerns of their government.
Daniel Webster
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[highlight-text]It must be felt that there is no national security but in the nation's humble acknowledged dependence upon God and His overruling providence.
John Adams
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[highlight-text]When I am abroad I always make it a rule never to criticize or attack the government of my own country. I make up for lost time when I come home.
Winston Churchill
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[highlight-text]Why has government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint.
Alexander Hamilton
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[highlight-text]The instant formal government is abolished society begins to act. A general association takes place and common interest produces common security.
Thomas Paine
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[highlight-text]The federal government has taken too much tax money from the people too much authority from the states and too much liberty with the Constitution.
Ronald Reagan
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[highlight-text]Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.
James Madison
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[highlight-text]The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them.
Karl Marx
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[highlight-text]Government is a trust and the officers of the government are trustees; and both the trust and the trustees are created for the benefit of the people.
Henry Clay
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[highlight-text]Majority rule only works if you're also considering individual rights. Because you can't have five wolves and one sheep voting on what to have for supper.
Larry Flynt
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[highlight-text]In the councils of government we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence whether sought or unsought by the military-industrial complex.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
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[highlight-text]I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.
Thomas Jefferson
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[highlight-text]Feeling good about government is like looking on the bright side of any catastrophe. When you quit looking on the bright side the catastrophe is still there.
P. J. O'Rourke
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[highlight-text]If human beings are fundamentally good no government is necessary; if they are fundamentally bad any government being composed of human beings would be bad also.
Fred Woodworth
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[highlight-text]Christmas is the time when kids tell Santa what they want and adults pay for it. Deficits are when adults tell government what they want and their kids pay for it.
Richard Lamm
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[highlight-text]No man undertakes a trade he has not learned even the meanest; yet every one thinks himself sufficiently qualified for the hardest of all trades - that of government.
Socrates
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[highlight-text]If liberty and equality as is thought by some are chiefly to be found in democracy they will be best attained when all persons alike share in government to the utmost.
Aristotle
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[highlight-text]Government is an unnecessary evil. Human beings when accustomed to taking responsibility for their own behavior can cooperate on a basis of mutual trust and helpfulness.
Fred Woodworth
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[highlight-text]The way people in democracies think of the government as something different from themselves is a real handicap. And of course sometimes the government confirms their opinion.
Lewis Mumford
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[highlight-text]I'm completely in favor of the separation of Church and State. My idea is that these two institutions screw us up enough on their own so both of them together is certain death.
George Carlin
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[highlight-text]It seems to me that government is like a pump and what it pumps up is just what we are a fair sample of the intellect the ethics and the morals of the people no better no worse.
Adlai E. Stevenson
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[highlight-text]If ever time should come when vain and aspiring men shall possess the highest seats in Government our country will stand in need of its experienced patriots to prevent its ruin.
Samuel Adams
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[highlight-text]Ninety eight percent of the adults in this country are decent hardworking honest Americans. It's the other lousy two percent that get all the publicity. But then we elected them.
Lily Tomlin
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[highlight-text]If we have Senators and Congressmen there that can't protect themselves against the evil temptations of lobbyists we don't need to change our lobbies we need to change our representatives.
Will Rogers
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[highlight-text]To those new States whom we welcome to the ranks of the free we pledge our word that one form of colonial control shall not have passed away merely to be replaced by a far more iron tyranny.
John F. Kennedy
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[highlight-text]Government alone cannot solve the problems we deal with in our correctional facilities treatment centers homeless shelters and crisis centers - we need our faith-based and community partners.
Dirk Kempthorne
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[highlight-text]The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government -- lest it come to dominate our lives and interests.
Patrick Henry
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[highlight-text]The government which was designed for the people has got into the hands of the bosses and their employers the special interests. An invisible empire has been set up above the forms of democracy.
Woodrow Wilson
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[highlight-text]Good intentions will always be pleaded for every assumption of authority. It is hardly too strong to say that the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions.
Daniel Webster
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[highlight-text]The new rage is to say that the government is the cause of all our problems and if only we had no government we'd have no problems. I can tell you that contradicts evidence history and common sense.
Bill Clinton
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[highlight-text]Anyone who is not an anarchist agrees with having a policeman at the corner of the street; but the danger at present is that of finding the policeman half-way down the chimney or even under the bed.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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[highlight-text]Our government... teaches the whole people by its example. If the government becomes the lawbreaker it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy.
Louis D. Brandeis
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[highlight-text]The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong but better so than not to be exercised at all.
Thomas Jefferson
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[highlight-text]Congress after years of stalling finally got around to clearing the way for informal discussions that might lead to possible formal talks that could potentially produce some kind of tentative agreements...
Dave Barry
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[highlight-text]The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have taking one with another no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office.
Henry Mencken
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[highlight-text]Now more than ever before the people are responsible for the character of their Congress. If that body be ignorant reckless and corrupt it is because the people tolerate ignorance recklessness and corruption.
James A. Garfield
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[highlight-text]The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return.
Gore Vidal
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[highlight-text]In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men the great difficulty lies in this: You must first enable the government to control the governed and in the next place oblige it to control itself.
Alexander Hamilton
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[highlight-text]Men speak of natural rights but I challenge any one to show where in nature any rights existed or were recognized until there was established for their declaration and protection a duly promulgated body of corresponding laws.
Calvin Coolidge
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[highlight-text]Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism but peace easy taxes and a tolerable administration of justice: all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things.
Adam Smith
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[highlight-text]The fact that political ideologies are tangible realities is not a proof of their vitally necessary character. The bubonic plague was an extraordinarily powerful social reality but no one would have regarded it as vitally necessary.
Wilhelm Reich
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[highlight-text]The Social Contract is nothing more or less than a vast conspiracy of human beings to lie to and humbug themselves and one another for the general good. Lies are the mortar that bind the savage individual man into the social masonry.
H. G. Wells
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[highlight-text]A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider god-fearing and pious. On the other hand they do less easily move against him believing that he has the gods on his side.
Aristotle
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[highlight-text]A popular Government without popular information or the means of acquiring it is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance and a people who mean to be their own Governors must arm themselves with the power knowledge gives.
James Madison
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[highlight-text]...a wise and frugal government which shall restrain men from injuring one another which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government.
Thomas Jefferson
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[highlight-text]We've been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule that government by an elite group is superior to government for by and of the people. Well if no one among us is capable of government himself then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else?
Ronald Reagan
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[highlight-text]The function of government ought to be: make sure you have good water to drink somebody picking up the garbage good roads to drive on enough electricity to turn your light bulbs and your record player on and whatever smaller amounts of regulatory assistance is necessary to make this society work.
Frank Zappa
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[highlight-text]Experts tell us that if the Millennium Bug is not fixed when the year 2000 arrives our financial records will be inaccurate our telephone system will be unreliable our government will be paralyzed and airline flights will be canceled without warning. In other words things will be pretty much the same as they are now.
Dave Barry
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[highlight-text]Egalitarians create the most dangerous inequality of all -- inequality of power. Allowing politicians to determine what all other human beings will be allowed to earn is one of the most reckless gambles imaginable. Like the income tax it may start off being applied only to the rich but it will inevitably reach us all.
Thomas Sowell
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[highlight-text]Of course the people dont want war...that is understood. But voice or no voice the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.
Hermann Goering
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[highlight-text]In the counsels of Government we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence whether sought or unsought by the Military Industrial Complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
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[highlight-text]I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with wholesome discretion the remedy is not to take it from them but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power.
Thomas Jefferson
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[highlight-text]The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.Workers of all countries...unite!
Frederick Engels
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[highlight-text]The statesman who would attempt to direct private people in what manner they ought to employ their capitals would not only load himeslf with a most unnecessary attention but assume an authority which could safely be trusted to no council and senate whatever and which would nowhere be so dangerous as in the hands of a man who had folly and presumption enough to fancy himself fit to exercise it.
Adam Smith
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[highlight-text]The statesman who would attempt to direct private people in what manner they ought to employ their capitals would not only load himeslf with a most unnecessary attention but assume an authority which could safetly be trusted to no council and senate whatever and which would nowhere be so dangerous as in the hands of a man who had folly and presumption enough to fancy himself fit to exercise it.
Adam Smith