Category: Government Quotes SMS

The People, though we think of a great entity when we use the word, means nothing more than so many millions of individual men.  ~James Bryce

Under capitalism man exploits man; under socialism the reverse is true.  ~Polish Proverb

You know why there are so many whitefish in the Yellowstone River?  Because the Fish and Game people have never done anything to help them.  ~Russell Chatham, Silent Seasons, 1978p185-93, CDAS

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

Democracy:  The state of affairs in which you consent to having your pocket picked, and elect the best man to do it.  ~Benjamin Lichtenberg

It might be more worthwhile if we stopped wringing our hands and started ringing our congressmen.  ~Author Unknown

The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush.  It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment.  ~Robert M. Hutchins, Great Books, 1954LCD

A survey says that American workers work the first three hours every day just to pay their taxes.  So that’s why we can’t get anything done in the morning:  We’re government workers.  ~Jay Leno

Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.  ~H.L. Mencken

If all the economists were laid end to end, they’d never reach a conclusion.  ~George Bernard Shaw

Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.  ~Denis Diderot

The most important political office is that of the private citizen.  ~Louis Brandeis

To rule is easy, to govern difficult.  ~Johann W. von Goethe

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

It’s not the voting that’s democracy; it’s the counting.  ~Tom Stoppard, Jumpers

Our government has become too responsive to trivial or ephemeral concerns, often at the expense of more important concerns or an erosion of our liberty, and it has made policy priorities more dependent on where TV journalists happen to point their cameras…. As a nation we have lost our sense of tragedy, a recognition that […]

For in reason, all government without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery.  ~Jonathan Swift, The Drapier’s LetterMHC

Here is my first principle of foreign policy:  good government at home.  ~William Ewart Gladstone

The mistakes made by Congress wouldn’t be so bad if the next Congress didn’t keep trying to correct them.  ~Cullen Hightower

If people behaved like governments, you’d call the cops.  ~Kelvin Throop

Many people say that government is necessary because some men cannot be trusted to look after themselves, but anarchists say that government is harmful because no men can be trusted to look after anyone else.  ~Nicolas Walter, About AnarchismMHC

Democracy is two wolves and a lamb deciding what to have for dinner.  Liberty is a well-armed lamb.  ~Author unknown, commonly misattributed to Benjamin Franklin  (Thanks, Art)

The Lord’s Prayer is 66 words, the Gettysburg Address is 286 words, there are 1,322 words in the Declaration of Independence, but government regulations on the sale of cabbage total 26,911 words.  ~National Review, 24 October

Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists.  ~John Kenneth Galbraith

Democracy is a government where you can say what you think even if you don’t think.  ~Author Unknown

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 Hamiltonpreviously anonymously published as Publius

The marvel of all history is the patience with which men and women submit to burdens unnecessarily laid upon them by their governments.  ~William E. Borah

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

A Conservative government is an organised hypocrisy.  ~Benjamin Disraeli, speech, 17 March 1845, addressing Prime Minister Robert Peel in the House of Commons, London, Selected Speeches of the Late Right Honourable the Earl of Beaconsfield, vol. 1, "Agricultural Distress," ed. T.E. Kebbes, 1882, 1845

Governments should not possess instruments of coercion and violence denied to their citizens.  ~Edgar A. Suter

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, The Mass Psychology of FascismMHC

Democracy is like a raft:  It won’t sink, but you will always have your feet wet.  ~Russell B. LongCUL

I never would believe that Providence had sent a few men into the world, ready booted and spurred to ride, and millions ready saddled and bridled to be ridden.  ~Richard Rumbold, 1685statement on scaffold before being hung for rebellionMHC

Washington is a place where politicians don’t know which way is up and taxes don’t know which way is down.  ~Robert Orbenin The Wall Street Journal

It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.  ~Mark Twain, Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar, Following the Equator, 1897

This country has come to feel the same when Congress is in session as when the baby gets hold of a hammer.  ~Will Rogers

In a state-run society the government promises you security.  But it’s a false promise predicated on the idea that the opposite of security is risk.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  The opposite of security is insecurity, and the only way to overcome insecurity is to take risks.  The gentle government that promises to […]

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

Democracy gives every man the right to be his own oppressor.  ~James Russell Lowell

It’s every American’s duty to support his government, but not necessarily in the style to which it has become accustomed.  ~Quoted by Thomas Clifford

Our political institutions work remarkably well.  They are designed to clang against each other.  The noise is democracy at work.  ~Michael Novak

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, The Match!, No. 79MHC

The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern.  Every class is unfit to govern.  ~Lord Acton, letter to Mary Gladstone, 24 April 1881MHC

If con is the opposite of pro, is Congress the opposite of progress?  ~Author Unknown

When government accepts responsibility for people, then people no longer take responsibility for themselves.  ~George Pataki

Bureaus are extrusions from the body politic – they are pus.  ~Martin H. FischerFFM

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

Better the occasional faults of a government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.  ~Franklin D. RooseveltCUL

How can one conceive of a one-party system in a country that has over two hundred varieties of cheese?  ~Charles de Gaulle, about FranceGCLE

The worst thing in this world, next to anarchy, is government.  ~Henry Ward Beecher, Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit, 1887LCD