Government

"I cannot accept, your canon that we are to judge pope and king unlike other men, with a favorable presumption that they do no wrong. If there is any presumption, it is the other way against holders of power ... Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. [emphasis added]
        --Lord Acton, to the bishop of London, 1887 Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."
        --John Adams

"There never was yet a people who must not have somebody or something to represent the dignity of the state."
        --John Adams

"Fear is the foundation of most governments."
        --John Adams

"Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
        --Frederic Bastiat

"The worst thing in this world, next to anarchy, is government."
        --Rev. Henry Ward Beecher

"Governments last as long as the undertaxed can defend themselves against the overtaxed."
        --Bernard Berenson

"The less people know about how sausages and laws are made, the better they'll sleep at night."
        --Otto von Bismark

"The government is the potent omnipresent teacher. For good or ill it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. To declare that the end justifies the means -- to declare that the government may commit crimes -- would bring terrible retribution."
        --Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis

"..If the Fed had a war on abortion like its war on poverty or war on drugs, within 5 years men would be having abortions!"
        --Harry Browne, Libertarian for President, 1996

"No government ought to exist for the purpose of checking the prosperity of its people or to allow such a principle in its policy."
        --Edmund Burke

"The best results in the operation of a government wherein every citizen has a share largely depend upon a proper limitation of the purely partisan zeal and effort and a correct appreciation of the time when the heat of the partisan should be merged in the patriotism of the citizen. ... At this hour the animosities of political strife, the bitterness of partisan defeat, and the exultation of partisan triumph should be supplanted by an ungrudging acquiescence in the popular will and a sober, conscientious concern for the general weal. ... Public extravagance begets extravagance among the people."
        --Grover Cleveland, First Inaugural Address, 1885

"I repeat...that all power is a trust; that we are accountable for its exercise; that, from the people, and for the people, all springs, and all must exist."
        --Benjamin Disraeli

"In dealing with the State, we ought to remember that its institutions are not aboriginal, though they existed before we were born: that they are not superior to the citizen: that every one of them was once the act of a single man: every law and usage was a man's expedient to meet a particular case: that they all are imitable, all alterable; we may make as good; we may make better."
        --Ralph Waldo Emerson

"If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there´d be a shortage of sand."
        --Milton Friedman

"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

"...the plan of the [Constitutional] convention aims only at a partial union or consolidation, the State governments would clearly retain all the rights of sovereignty which they before had, and which were not, by that act, exclusively delegated to the United States."
        --Alexander Hamilton

"Those in possession of absolute power can not only prophesy and make their prophecies come true, but they can also lie and make their lies come true."
        --Eric Hoffer, The Passionate Stateof Mind

"In Washington, of course, evading responsibility is an art form, so it is not always easy to tell who's responsible for which mess."
        --David Horowitz

"That government is best which governs the least, because its people discipline themselves."
        --Thomas Jefferson

"I think we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious."
        --Thomas Jefferson

"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, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicity."
        --Thomas Jefferson

"Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves, therefore, are its only safe depositories."
        --Thomas Jefferson

"The whole art of government consists in the art of being honest."
        --Thomas Jefferson

"The care of human life and happiness and not their destruction is the first and only legitimate object of good government."
        --Thomas Jefferson

"The way to have good and safe government is not to trust it all to one, but divide it among the many, distributing to everyone exactly the function he is competent to. Let the national government be entrusted with the defense of the nation and its foreign and federal relations; the state governments with the civil rights, laws, police and administration of what concerns the state generally; the counties with the local concerns of the counties; and each ward direct the interests within itself. It is by dividing and subdividing these republics from the great national one down through all its subordinations until it ends in the administration of every man's farm by himself, by placing under everyone what his own eye may superintend, that all will be done for the best."
        --Thomas Jefferson

"The legislative powers of the government reach actions only, and not opinions."
        --Thomas Jefferson

"Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government; whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied upon to set them to rights."
        --Thomas Jefferson

"...Enlightened by a benign religion, professed, indeed, and practiced in various forms, yet all of them inculcating honesty, truth, temperance, gratitude, and the love of man, acknowledging and adoring an overruling Providence, which by all its dispensations proves that it delights in the happiness of man here and his greater happiness hereafter -- with all these blessings, what more is necessary to make us a happy and a prosperous people? Still one thing more...a wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, 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, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities. ... "
        --Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address, 1801

"Government can do something for the people only in proportion as it can do something to the people."
        --Thomas Jefferson

"It is easy to think the State has a lot of different objects -- military, political, economic, and what not. But in a way things are much simpler than that. The State exists simply to promote and to protect the ordinary happiness of human beings in this life. A husband and wife chatting over a fire, a couple of friends having a game of darts in a pub, a man reading a book in his own room or digging in his own garden -- that is what the State is there for. And unless they are helping to increase and prolong and protect such moments, all the laws, parliaments, armies, courts, police, economics, etc., are simply a waste of time."
        --C.S. Lewis

"It is perfectly true that the government is best which governs least. It is equally true that the government is best which provides most."
        --Walter Lippmann

"[A]ll power is originally vested in, and consequently derived from, the people. That government is instituted and ought to be exercised for the benefit of the people; which consists in the enjoyment of life and liberty and the right of acquiring property, and generally of pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety. That the people have an indubitable, unalienable, and indefeasible right to reform or change their government whenever it be found adverse or inadequate to the purpose of its institution."
        --James Madison

"The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is its inefficiency."
        --Eugene McCarthy

"[T]he only thing wrong with Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address was that it was the South, not the North, that was fighting for a government of the people, by the people and for the people."
        --H. L. Mencken

"All government, in its essence, is organized exploitation, and in virtually all of its existing forms it is the implacable enemy of every industrious and well-disposed man."
        --H. L. Mencken

"People constantly speak of 'the government' doing this or that, as they might speak of God doing it. But the government is really nothing but a group of men, and usually they are very inferior men."
        --H. L. Mencken

"People constantly speak of 'the government' doing this or that, as they might speak of God doing it. But the government is really nothing but a group of men, and usually they are very inferior men."
        --H. L. Mencken

"It is the theory of all modern civilized governments that they protect and foster the liberty of the citizen; it is the practice of all of them to limit its exercise, and sometimes very narrowly."
        --H. L. Mencken

"The worth of a state, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it."
        --John Stuart Mill

"The deterioration of every government begins with the decay of the principles on which it was founded."
        --C. L. De Montesquieu

"Since people, in a competitive or any other society, are by no means always just to each other, some regulation by the state in its capacity of umpire is unavoidable, What must be kept in mind is that the greatest injustice of all is done when the umpire forgets that he too is bound by the rules, and begins to make them as between contestants in behalf of his own prejudices."
        --Felix Morley, Freedom and Federalism

"[T]he State's criminality is nothing new and nothing to be wondered at. It began when the first predatory group of men clustered together and formed the State, and it will continue as long as the State exists in the world, because the State is fundamentally an anti-social institution, fundamentally criminal. The idea that the State originated to serve any kind of social purpose is completely unhistorical. It originated in conquest and confiscation--that is to say, in crime. It originated for the purpose of maintaining the division of society into an owning-and-exploiting class and a propertyless dependent class--that is, for a criminal purpose.
     No State known to history originated in any other manner, or for any other purpose. Like all predatory or parasitic institutions, its first instinct is that of self-preservation. All its enterprises are directed first towards preserving its own life, and, second, towards increasing its own power and enlarging the scope of its own activity. For the sake of this it will, and regularly does, commit any crime which circumstances make expedient."
        --Albert Jay Nock, The Criminality ofthe State

"Many now believe that with the rise of the totalitarian State the world has entered upon a new era of barbarism. It has not. The totalitarian State is only the State; the kind of thing it does is only what the State has always done with unfailing regularity, if it had the power to do it, wherever and whenever its own aggrandizement made that kind of thing expedient. Give any State like power hereafter, and put it in like circumstances, and it will do precisely the same kind of thing. The State will unfailingly aggrandize itself, if only it has the power, first at the expense of its own citizens, and then at the expense of anyone else in sight. It has always done so, and always will."
        --Albert Jay Nock, The Criminality ofthe State

"Here is the Golden Rule of sound citizenship, the first and greatest lesson in the study of politics: You get the same order of criminality from any State to which you give power to exercise it; and whatever power you give the State to do things FOR you carries with it the equivalent power to do things TO you. [emphasis in the original]
        --Albert Jay Nock, The Criminality of the State These things I believe: That government should butt out. That freedom is our most precious commodity and if we are not eternally vigilant government will take it all away. That individual freedom demands individual responsibility. That government is (contrary to George W. Bush) not a necessary good but an unavoidable evil. That the executive branch has grown too strong, the judicial branch too arrogant and the legislative branch too stupid. That political parties have become close to meaningless. That government should work to insure the rights of the individual, not plot to take them away. That government should provide for the national defense and work to insure domestic tranquillity. That foreign trade should be fair rather than free. That America should be wary of foreign entanglements. That the tree of liberty needs to be watered from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. That guns do more than protect us from criminals; more importantly, they protect us from the ongoing threat of government. That states are the bulwark of our freedom. That states should have the right to secede from the Union. That once a year we should hang someone in government as an example to his fellows."
        --Lyn Nofziger

"SOME writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.
         Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one ..."
        --P.J. O'Rourke, Parliament of Whores

"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

"The three branches of government number considerably more than three and ar not, in any sense, 'branches' since that would imply that there is something they are all attached to besides self-aggrandizement and our pocketbooks. ... Government is not a machine with parts; it's an organism. When does an intestine quit being and intestine and start becoming an asshole?"
        --P.J. O'Rourke

"Government isn't a good way to solve problems ... [G]overnment is concerned mostly with self-perpetuation and is subject to fantastic ideas about its own capabilities. ... [G]overnment is wasteful of the nation's resources, immune to common sense and subject to pressure from every half-organized bouquet of assholes. ... [G]overnment is distrustful of and disrespectful toward average Americans while being easily gulled by Americans with money, influence or fame."
        --P.J. O'Rourke

"The main reason to be opposed to political control of smoking is to keep power --even the smallest and silliest kind of power -- out of the hands of ... members of a dangerous class --the class that knows what´s good for us better than we do."
        --P.J. O'Rourke

"When a government controls both the economic power of individuals and the coercive power of the state ... this violates a fundamental rule of happy living: Never let the people with all the money and the people with all the guns be the same people."
        --P.J. O'Rourke

"Government does not cause affluence. Citizens of totalitarian countries have plenty of government and nothing of anything else."
        --P.J. O'Rourke

"The term consumerism has been current since the middle 1960s, about the same length of time as the Department of Transportation itself. Literally interpreted, the word means 'an ideology based on the opposite of being productive.' This ideology has caused enormous changes in the American economy. At one time complaining was a cottage industry. The typical maker of complaints gave them to (or traded them with) friends and family members. Sometimes the complaints were sent to newspapers or included in prayers. Friends, family, the press and God then ignored the complaints. In the sixties, however, various consumer advocates began to help complainers find a market for their wares. There is only one organization that is required to take everyone -- and their complaints -- seriously. So the government became the foremost grumble customer. And it is, of course, the government's bureaucratic agencies who have to do the buying."
        --P.J. O'Rourke

"A little government and a little luck are necessary in life, but only a fool trusts either of them."
        -- P.J.O'Rourke

"Society in every state is a blessing, but government, even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one."
        --Thomas Paine

"It has been thought a considerable advance towards establishing the principles of Freedom, to say, that government is a compact between those who govern and those that are governed: but this cannot be true, because it is putting the effect before the cause; for as man must have existed before governments existed, there necessarily was a time when governments did not exist, and consequently there could originally exist no governors to form such a compact with. The fact therefore must be, that the individuals themselves, each in his own personal and sovereign right, entered into a compact with each other to produce a government: and this is the only mode in which governments have a right to arise, and the only principle on which they have a right to exist."
        --Thomas Paine

"The best minds are not in government. If any were, business would hire them away."
        --Ronald Reagan

"Public servants say, always with the best of intentions, 'What greater service we could render if only we had a little more money and a little more power.' But the truth is that outside of its legitimate function, government does nothing as well or as economically as the private sector."
        --Ronald Reagan

"[G]overnment's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it."
        --Ronald Reagan

"We who live in free market societies believe that growth, prosperity and ultimately human fulfillment, are created from the bottom up, not the government down. Only when the human spirit is allowed to invent and create, only when individuals are given a personal stake in deciding economic policies and benefitting from their success -- only then can societies remain economically alive, dynamic, progressive, and free. Trust the people. This is the one irrefutable lesson of the entire postwar period contradicting the notion that rigid government controls are essential to economic development."
        --Ronald Reagan

"Government is not a solution to our problem, government is the problem. [emphasis in the original]
        --Ronald Reagan 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

"Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.... 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? All of us together, in and out of government, must bear the burden. The solutions we seek must be equitable, with no one group singled out to pay a higher price."
        --Ronald Reagan

"Things in our country run in spite of the government, not by the aid of it."
        --Will Rogers

"This thing about getting rid of a man in the Cabinet is all right, but there is one bad feature to it that few people realize. That is, that unfortunately every one of them is replaced by someone else. If it wasn't for that, this resignation business would be great."
        --Will Rogers

"Of course nothing is ever done about a [presidential] commission report, except, they say, once a man at the state prison for the criminally insane actually read one once clear through. Then he did something about it. He made a bonfire that lasted a week."
        --Will Rogers

"Will somebody please tell me what they do with all the Vice-Presidents a bank has?
    Why the United States is the biggest business institution in the world, and they got only one Vice-President and nobody has ever found anything for him to do."
        --Will Rogers

"On account of us being a democracy and run by the people, we are the only people in the world that has to keep a government four years no matter what it does."
        --Will Rogers

"The great non sequitur committed by defenders of the State, including classical Aristotelian and Thomist philosophers, is to leap from the necessity of society to the necessity of the State."
        --Murray Rothbard

"Laws do not persuade just because they threaten."
        --Lucius Annaeus Seneca

"It is a general maxim that all governments find a use for as much money as they can raise. Indeed, they have commonly demands for more...I take this as a settled truth, that they will all spend as much as their revenue; that is, will live up to their income."
        --James Smith, Massachusetts, during the debates to ratify the U.S. Constitution

"The Republican form of government is the highest form of government; but because of this it requires the highest type of human nature -- a type nowhere at present existing."
        --Herbert Spencer

"Trade and commerce, if they were not made of Indian rubber, would never manage to bounce over the obstacles which legislators are continually putting in their way."
        --Henry David Thoreau, "Civil Disobedience," 1849

"That government is best which governs least."
        --Henry David Thoreau

"When you have an efficient government, you have a dictatorship."
        --Harry S. Truman

"[N]o country can be well governed unless its citizens as a body keep religiously before their minds that they are the guardians of the law and that the law officers are only the machinery for its execution, nothing more."
        --Mark Twain

"The mania for giving the Government power to meddle with the private affairs of cities or citizens is likely to cause endless trouble, through the rivaly of schools and creeds that are anxious to obtain official recognition, and there is great danger that our people will lose our independence of thought and action which is the cause of much of our greatness, and sink into the helplessness of the Frenchman or German who expects his government to feed him when hungry, clothe him when naked, to prescribe when his child may be born and when he may die, and, in fine, to regulate every act of humanity from the cradle to the tomb, including the manner in which he may seek future admission to paradise."
        --Mark Twain

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