Quotes About Government

When government does, occasionally, work, it works in an elitist fashion. That is, government is most easily manipulated by people who have money and power already. This is why government benefits usually go to people who don't need benefits from government. Government may make some environmental improvements, but these will be improvements for rich bird-watchers. And no one in government will remember that when poor people go bird-watching they do it at Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Can I say one other thing that`s very important? I`m indebted to Donald Trump for a long time, we`ve had this problem that people disliked government. And the health care bill has shown reminded people and Donald Trump has shown people there is something a lot worse than government. It`s not government. That as bad as they might have thought the government was on health care, it`s now created people that the absence of government healthcare is even worse.

If, for example, existing government intervention is minor, we shall attach a smaller weight to the negative effect of additional government intervention. This is an important reason why many earlier liberals, like Henry Simons, writing at a time when government was small by today's standards, were willing to have government undertake activities that today's liberals would not accept now that government has become so overgrown.

Government grows despite repeated failures to serve the public well because government's purpose no longer is to serve the public. Government now serves primarily the interests of those who work for the government.

To speak practically and as a citizen, unlike those who call themselves no-government men, I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government. Let every man make known what kind of government would command his respect, and that will be one step toward obtaining it.

Conservatives believe government's principal functions are the preservation of freedom and removal of restraints on the individual. Liberalism's ascent in the first two-thirds of this century reflected the new belief that government should also confer capacities on individuals. Liberalism's decline in the final third of this century has reflected doubts about whether government can be good at that, or whether government that is good at that is good for the nation's character.

The Senate, compared to the House, is where things are supposed to slow down, by design, Founding Father design. The Founding Fathers were hell-bent to stop government action. The Constitution limited government. And that's why people like Obama and Democrats call it a charter of negative liberties because it limits government. It's an anti-government, pro-citizen document. And the founders wanted to make it hard.

I think myself that we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious. Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have ... The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases. The two enemies of the people are criminals and government, so let us tie the second down with the chains of the constitution so the second will not become the legalized version of the first.

Do you know that all of the money that we are spending, that the government is spending, must come from you? The government has no great pile of gold to which it can go to get what it gives you. The government has not one cent that it does not take from your pockets. Do not imagine, do not believe, do not go on the theory that you are not to pay this bill, unless the fundamentals of our government are to be overturned.

Ours was the first revolution in the history of mankind that truly reversed the course of government, and with three little words: 'We the people.' 'We the people' tell the government what to do, it doesn't tell us. 'We the people' are the driver, the government is the car. And we decide where it should go, and by what route, and how fast. Almost all the world's constitutions are documents in which governments tell the people what their privileges are. Our Constitution is a document in which 'We the people' tell the government what it is allowed to do. 'We the people' are free.

All the things I used to count on to get my music out there - record companies, they're all gone. And radio stations, they're gone - they're completely controlled by the government. If they're not controlled by the government, they're controlled by a programmer who's controlled by the government. Mainstream radio is suspect. You can't trust it.

It might be a good idea to have government totally by the people - that each person takes four or five hours of the week doing some kind of government job - in other words, along with what you do you also help maintain the government so no one person has total control - I might go down to an office for four hours and do whatever I'm capable of doing - writing out receipts for food distribution in a certain area - but it's all actually a monstrous secretarial job and that's all I think it should be.

"Big" government? Who wants that? I just want effective government. That means America's government needs to be big in some places, small in others and non-existent in others.

Communism is not a political party nor a political plan under the Constitution; it is a system of government that is the opposite of our Constitutional government, and it would be necessary to destroy our government before Communism could be set up in the United States....[Communism] even reaches its hand into the sanctity of the family circle itself, disrupting the normal relationship of parent and child, all in a manner unknown and unsanctioned under the Constitutional guarantees under which we in America live.

I do not want to live under a philanthropy. I do not want to be taken care of by the government.... We do not want a benevolent government. We want a free and a just government.

Government is instituted to protect property of every sort; as well that which lies in the various rights of individuals, as that which the term particularly expresses. This being the end of government, that alone is a just government which impartially secures to every man whatever is his own.

They say, oh, let’s have multiparty politics. Let’s have different parties change and be in charge of the Government. Is it that simple? You vote in a Division Three government, not a Division One government, and the whole economy will just subside within three, four years. Finished.

We are going to be a government of no surprises and no excuses; a government which keeps its commitments and a government which is straight and candid with the Australian people and that's what we intend to do.

The media has brainwashed the electorate to expect the government to do something. The best economic policy of any government is to do nothing but reduce the size of the government, reduce the size of the laws, and reduce the size of regulations.

This is what the government is, has always been, the creator and defender of privilege; the organization of oppression and revenge. To hope that it can ever become anything else is the vainest of delusions. They tell you that Anarchy, the dream of social order without government, is a wild fancy. The wildest dream that ever entered the heart of man is the dream that mankind can ever help itself through an appeal to law, or to come to any order that will not result in slavery wherein there is any excuse for government.

Rights are either God-given as part of the divine plan, or they are granted by government as part of the political plan. If we accept the premise that human rights are granted by government, then we must be willing to accept the corollary that they can be denied by government.

I believe that smaller government is better government. But I also believe that in the areas where government does play a legitimate role, we should demand that it is done better.

Those who cry out that the government should 'do something' never even ask for data on what has actually happened when the government did something, compared to what actually happened when the government did nothing.

A constitution, therefore, is to a government what the laws made afterwards by that government are to a court of judicature. The court of judicature does not make the laws, neither can it alter them; it only acts in conformity to the laws made: and the government is in like manner governed by the constitution.

It is all the more necessary under a system of free government that the people should be enlightened, that they should be correctly informed, than it is under an absolute government that they should be ignorant. Under a republic the institutions of learning, while bound by the constitution and laws, are in no way subservient to the government.

Even if someone wanted a purely free-market, competitive media system, it would require extensive government regulation to set up those markets. All our largest media companies are based on the grant of explicit government monopoly privileges and licenses, or franchises, or subsidies. The government didn't come in after the system was in place, it built the system in the first place.

I learnt a lot in government, and I've learnt a lot since leaving government. The kind of journey of being in government is that you start at your most popular and least capable, and you end at your most capable and least popular.

Government shutdowns do not actually become what the term implies. Two-thirds of the government cannot shut down. We're only talking about the third of government that's discretionary spending, and even at that, nobody loses their jobs, and nobody loses their Thanksgiving turkey. The whole thing has resulted from the Republican Party thinking they bought the farm back in 1995.

The ultimate check against government tyranny is an informed electorate who will elect people who believe in limited government. I don't want to embrace the idea we want people to take to the streets with guns. I want people to go to the voting booth and check an out of control government by electing conservatives.

Soon we will be addicted to the federal government, and we will not want to support our local police force. I have been a believer that the government that governs best is the government that governs least.

Thomas Jefferson despised newspapers, with considerable justification. They printed libels and slanders about him that persist to the present day. Yet he famously said that if he had to choose between government without newspapers and newspapers without government, he would cheerfully choose to live in a land with newspapers (even not very good ones) and no government.

If you start with the presumptions that liberals do, that corporations are evil and it all descends from that and that government is great and that government's there to make sure corporations play fair and are not mean and do not rip people off, there's a little bit of truth in everything. Some corporations are bad, some corporations have done bad things, but as a general rule, it's dangerous to subscribe to things like that.

The strong are always free by virtue of their superior strength. So long as government is a mere contest as to which of two parties shall rule the other, the weaker must always succumb. And whether the contest be carried on with ballots or bullets, the principle is the same; for under the theory of government now prevailing, the ballot either signifies a bullet, or it signifies nothing. And no one can consistently use a ballot, unless he intends to use a bullet, if the latter should be needed to insure submission to the former.

There will be found to exist at all times an imperious necessity for restraining all the functionaries of the Government within the range of their respective powers thereby preserving a just balance between the powers granted to this Government and those reserved to the States and to the people.

It's not government that makes business successful. It's not government investments that makes businesses grow and hire people.

Writing checks to the IRS that include strings of zeros does not bother me ... Overall, we feel extraordinarily lucky to have been dealt a hand in life that enables us to write large checks to the government rather than one requiring the government to regularly write checks to us-say, because we are disabled or unemployed.

We believe in honesty, morality, and purity; but when they enact tyrannical laws, forbidding us the free exercise of our religion, we cannot submit. God is greater than the United States, and when the Government conflicts with heaven, we will be ranged under the banner of heaven and against the Government...Polygamy is a divine institution. It has been banded down direct from God. The United States cannot abolish it. No nation on the earth can prevent it, nor all the nations of the earth combined...I defy the United States; I will obey God.

We've got the government shutdown, but the beginning of Obamacare. You know what that means? You can now complain to your doctor about the government making you sick.

I had a lot of friends in high school who said, 'Louie, I don't care what the government does as long as they leave me alone.' Well, guess what, when you don't care what the government does, it does not leave you alone.

A very wise father once remarked, that in the government of his children, he forbid as few things as possible; a wise legislature would do the same. It is folly to make laws on subjects beyond human prerogative, knowing that in the very nature of things they must be set aside. To make laws that man cannot and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt. It is very important in a republic, that the people should respect the laws, for if we throw them to the winds, what becomes of civil government?

If you look at government policy generally, what government tries to do in all instances is to make sure that we take care of all elements that might relate to a particular issue.

Within my own lifetime, I have seen the most ferocious assaults on Christian faith and morals; first on the part of the intellectual community, and then on the part of the government... the federal government has not even tried to conceal its hostility to religion.

The fundamental question facing Iraq government is whether or not we will stand with reformers across the region. It's really the task. And we're going to stand with this government.

The career politicians in Washington had transformed a government "for the people" into a government for themselves and for special interests.

The present government is very insistent that business sponsorship should replace government sponsorship of the arts. Business sponsorship won't happen unless you make tax concessions, which they won't.

[T]he central problem of government is a religious one; and anyone who assumes that he can form his political beliefs without consulting his ethics, which have their basis in religious conviction, is deceiving himself either about the true nature of government or his moral responsibility for his actions

Terrorism is a direct response to the crimes our government has committed against foreigners (besides which, the actual terrorists are within our own government)

For as long as I can remember the slogan has been ... the federal government ought to behave more like families, because families balance their budgets. It turns out that families looked around and said, "You know what? Let's behave more like the government!"