Government Quotes

An elephant is a mouse, built to government specifications.

John Herro

So long as governments set the example of killing their enemies, private citizens will occasionally kill their. s.

Elbert Hubbard

There is no legitimacy on earth but in a government which is the choice of the nation.

Joseph Bonaparte

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

Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address

And that this country shall have a new birth of freedom, and that this government, of the people, for the people, by the people, shall not perish from the Earth.

Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address

Public confidence in the integrity of the Government is indispensable to faith in democracy and when we lose faith in the system, we have lost faith in everything we fight and spend for.

Adlai E. Jr. Stevenson

I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time.

H. L. Mencken

There is no kind of dishonesty into which otherwise good people more easily and frequently fall than that of defrauding the government.

Benjamin Franklin

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

It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.

Sir Winston Churchill

I believe that truth is the glue that holds government together, not only our government but civilization itself.

Gerald R. Ford, Inaugural Address, 9 August 1974

The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket, nor breaks my leg.

Thomas Jefferson

Whenever is found what is called a paternal government, there is found state education. It has been discovered that the best way to ensure implicit obedience is to commence tyranny in the nursery.

Benjamin Disraeli

A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away.

Barry Goldwate

People in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than governments.

Dwight D Eisenhowe

There has never been a perfect government, because men have passions and if they did not have passions, there would be no need for government.

Francois Marie Arouet Voltaire

A government is the only known vessel that leaks from the top.

James Reston

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

Bertrand Russell

No dictator, no invader, can hold an imprisoned population by force of arms forever. There is no greater power in the universe than the need for freedom. Against that power, governments and tyrants and armies cannot stand. The Centauri learned this lesson once. We will teach it to them again. Though it take a thousand years, we will be free.

J. Michael Straczynski

Government is not reason; it is not eloquence; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.

George Washington

Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is in prison.

Henry David Thoreau

In general, the art of government consists in taking as much money as possible from one part of the citizens to give to the other.

Voltaire, The Portable Voltaire

The biggest lesson I learned from Vietnam is not to trust our own government statements. I had no idea until then that you could not rely on them.

William Fullbright

Nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced. It is an open secret that the dangerous increase of crime in this counrty is closely related with this.

Albert Einstein

If our democracy is to flourish, it must have criticism; if our government is to function it must have dissent.

Henry Commage

I believe and I say it is true Democratic feeling, that all the measures of the government are directed tot he purpose of making the rich richer and the poor poorer.

William Henry Harrison, Speech, October 1, 1840

Manufacturing and commercial monopolies owe their origin not to a tendency imminent in a capitalist economy but to governmental interventionist policy directed against free trade and laissez faire.

Ludwig Mises

Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.

Frederick Bastiat, "Government" published in 1848

Government expands to absorb revenue - And then some.

Tom Wicke

Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

John Quincy Adams

The one bonus of not lifting the ban on gays in the military is that the next time the government mandates a draft, we can all declare we are homosexual instead of running off to Canada.

Lorne Bloch

Asking to meet with Italian businessmen instead of government officials. I want to talk to these people because they stay in power and you change all the time.

Nikita Khrushchev

The government deficit is the difference between the amount of money the government spends and the amount it has the nerve to collect.

Sam Ewig

The work of internal government has become the task of controlling the thousands of fifth - Rate men.

Henry B. Adams

There is no nonsense so errant that it cannot be made the creed of the vast majority by adequate governmental action.

Bertrand Russell

Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or ill, it teaches the whole people by its example.

Louis D. Brandeis

Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.

Harry S Truman, August 8, 1950