Big Government

"Everyone wants to live at the expense of the state. They forget that the state wants to live at the expense of everyone."
        --Frederic Bastiat

"But how is this legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime."
        --Frederic Bastiat

"[A] society deadened by a smothering network of laws while finding release in moral chaos is not likely to be either happy or stable."
        --Robert Bork

"Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficial."
        --Justice Louis Brandeis

"What has always made the state a hell on earth has been precisely that man has tried to make it his heaven."
        --F. Hoelderlin

"Were we directed from Washington when to sow and when to reap, we should soon want bread."
        --Thomas Jefferson

"I own I am not a friend to a very energetic government. It is always oppressive."
        --Thomas Jefferson

"Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms [of government] those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny."
        --Thomas Jefferson

"An elected despotism is not the government we fought for."
        --Thomas Jefferson

"For who can endure a doctrine which would allow only dentists to say whether our teeth were aching, only cobblers to say whether our shoes hurt us, and only governments to tell us whether we were being well governed?"
        --C.S. Lewis

"The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant."
        --John Stuart Mill

"Beware the greedy hand of government, thrusting itself into every corner and crevice of industry."
        --Thomas Paine

"Socialism is after all, the Viagra of politics...."
        --Michael Peirce

"Nations crumble from within when the citizenry asks of government those things which the citizenry might better provide for itself. ... [H]ope we have once again reminded people that man is not free unless government is limited. There's a clear cause and effect here that is as neat and predictable as a law of physics: As government expands, liberty contracts."
        --Ronald Reagan

"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

"It is not my intention to do away with government. It is, rather, to make it work--work with us, not over us; to stand by our side, not ride on our back. Government can and must provide opportunity, not smother it; foster productivity, not stifle it. It is no coincidence that our present troubles parallel and are proportionate to the intervention and intrusion in our lives that result from unnecessary and excessive growth of government. ... We shall reflect the compassion that is so much a part of your makeup. How can we love our country and not love our countrymen, and loving them, not reach out a hand when they fall, heal them when they are sick, and provide opportunities to make them self-sufficient so they will be equal in fact and not just in theory? ... We are a nation under God, and I believe God intended for us to be free. It would be fitting and good, I think, if on each Inauguration Day in future years it should be declared a day of prayer."
        --Ronald Reagan, First Inaugural Address, 1981

"The Declaration of Independence...is not a legal prescription conferring powers upon the courts; and the Constitution's refusal to 'deny or disparage' other rights is far removed from affirming any one of them, and even farther removed from authorizing judges to identify what they might be, and to enforce the judges' list against laws duly enacted by the people."
        --Dr. Laura Schlessinger

"At the end of a century that has seen the evils of communism, Nazism and other modern tyrannies, the impulse to centralize power remains amazingly persistent."
        --Joseph Sobran

"One of the reasons for conspiracy theories is an assumption that people in high places always know what they are doing. When they do something that makes no sense, devious reasons are imagined by conspiracy theorists, when in fact it may be due to plain old ignorance and incompetence."
        --Thomas Sowell, 05/18/99

"The question is not what anybody deserves. The question is who is to take on the God-like role of deciding what everybody else deserves. You can talk about 'social justice' all you want. But what death taxes boil down to is letting politicians take money from widows and orphans to pay for goodies that they will hand out to others, in order to buy votes to get re-elected. That is not social justice or any other kind of justice."
        --Thomas Sowell

"The more is given the less the people will work for themselves, and the less they work the more their poverty will increase."
        --Tolstoi

"Whatever the human faculty, or the sphere of its exercise, may be, the presumption that because a faculty has proved equal to the accomplishment of a limited task within its proper field it may therefore be counted upon to produce some inordinate effort in a different set of circumstances, is never anything but an intellectual and a moral aberration and never leads to anything but certain disaster."
        --Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History