Government Quotes

Frederick bastiat,
So they the Government go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all - Powerful to be impotent.
Sir Winston Churchill, Hansard, November 12, 1936
Elias boudinot - good government generally begins in the family,...
It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment.
Ansel Adams
But a Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored. Liberty, once lost, is lost forever.
John Adams
Thomas paine, in his
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
When you have an efficient government, you have a dictatorship.
Harry S Truman
Different men seek after happiness in different ways and by different means, and so make for themselves different modes of life and forms of government.
Aristotle
A little rebellion now and then... is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government.
Thomas Jefferson, Letter to James Madison, 1787
They who seek to establish systems of government based on the regimentation of all human beings by a handful of individual rulers... call this a new order. It is not new and it is not order.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt
All governments eventually lean further and further towards aristocracy.
Frank Herbert, Dune
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
That government is best which governs least. - From Civil Disobedience.
Henry David Thoreau
All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptable. Such people have a tendency to become drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted.
Frank Herbert, Chapterhouse Dune, Missionaria Protectiva
The office of government is not to confer happiness, but to give men the opportunity to work out happiness for themselves.
William Ellery Channing
I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it.
Dwight D. Eisenhowe
The most valuable function performed by the federal government is entertainment.
Dave Barry
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program.
Bob Wells
Disbelief in magic can force a poor soul into believing in government and business.
Tom Robbins
It was once said that the moral test of Government is how that Government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped.
Hubert H. Humphrey
Ed, we just witnessed a peaceful transition in government. Do you realize how miraculous that is... Today, tiny Cicely, Alaska, stood up and put another W in the win category for democracy.
Jeff Melvoin
Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or ill, it teaches the whole people by its example.
Louis D. Brandeis
Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government...
Thomas Jefferson (The Declaration of Independence)
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
No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets.
Edward Abbey
During these times, when crazy people are running the government, all you can do is laugh.
Bill McKenney, Speech to the Harvard Antimony Society, August 15, 2005
A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.
George Bernard Shaw
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
Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.
Thomas Jefferson
A society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves.
Bertrand de Jouvenal
This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can excercise their constitutional right of amending it, or excercise their revolutionary right to overthrow it.
Abraham Lincoln
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
Liberty has never come from the government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of it. The history of liberty is a history of resistance. The history of liberty is a history of limitations of governmental power, not the increase of it.
Nadia Boulange
The art of government is the organization of idolatry.
George Bernard Shaw
Religion... is the basis and foundation of government... before any man can be considered as a member of civil society, he must be considered as a subject of the Governor of the Universe.
James Madison
I bear solemn witness to the fact that NATO heads of state and of government meet only to go through the tedious motions of reading speeches, drafted by others, with the principal objective of not rocking the boat.
Pierre Elliott Trudeau
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 popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to 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 which knowledge gives.
James Madison
Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
H. L. Mencken