Government

"A wise government knows how to enforce with temper, or to conciliate with dignity, but a weak one is odious in the former, and contemptible in the latter."

"Welche Regierung die beste sei? Diejenige, die uns lehrt, uns selbst zu regieren."

"Fellow-citizens! Clouds and darkness are round about Him! His pavilion is dark waters and thick clouds of the skies! Justice and judgment are the habitation of his throne! Mercy and truth shall go before his face! Fellow-citizens! God reigns and the government at Washington still lives."

"Our form of government may remain notwithstanding legislation or decision, but, as long ago observed, it is with governments, as with religion, the form may survive the substance of the faith."

"The small progress we have made after four or five weeks close attendance and continual reasonings with each other … is, methinks, a melancholy proof of the imperfection of the human understanding. We indeed seem to feel our own want of political wisdom, since we have been running about in search of it. We have gone back to ancient history for models of government, and examined the different forms of those republics which, having been formed with seeds of their own dissolution, now no longer exist."

"In a political sense, there is one problem that currently underlies all of the others. That problem is making Government sufficiently responsive to the people. If we don't make government responsive to the people, we don't make it believable. And we must make government believable if we are to have a functioning democracy."

"The American wage earner and the American housewife are a lot better economists than most economists care to admit. They know that a government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have."

"For nearly five years the present Ministers have harassed every trade, worried every profession, and assailed or menaced every class, institution, and species of property in the country. Occasionally they have varied this state of civil warfare by perpetrating some job which outraged public opinion, or by stumbling into mistakes which have been always discreditable, and sometimes ruinous. All this they call a policy, and seem quite proud of it; but the country has, I think, made up its mind to close this career of plundering and blundering."

"The administration of government, like a guardianship ought to be directed to the good of those who confer, not of those who receive the trust."

"Only perhaps in the United States, which alone of countries can do without governing,—every man being at least able to live, and move off into the wilderness, let Congress jargon as it will,—can such a form of so-called "Government" continue for any length of time to torment men with the semblance, when the indispensable substance is not there."

"In the long-run every Government is the exact symbol of its People, with their wisdom and unwisdom; we have to say, Like People like Government."

"The nearest approach to immortality on earth is a government bureau."

"We cannot meet it [the threat of dictatorship] if we turn this country into a wishy-washy imitation of totalitarianism, where every man's hand is out for pabulum and virile creativeness has given place to the patronizing favor of swollen bureaucracy."

"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 in the administration of the criminal law the end justifies the means—to declare that the Government may commit crimes in order to secure the conviction of a private criminal—would bring terrible retribution."

"And thus Bureaucracy, the giant power wielded by pigmies, came into the world."

"People should not be afraid of their government. Governments should be afraid of their people."

"A government is a body of people, usually notably ungoverned."

"The government has strategies. The people have counterstrategies."

"With more and more governments, however crude and experimental, dedicated to industrial democracy and universal brotherhood, the era of peace and joy in living will come on earth."

"Better were the prospects of a people under the influence of the worst government who should hold the power of changing it, than those of a people under the best who should hold no such power."

"Government is not a warfare of interests. We shall not gain our ends by heat and bitterness, which make it impossible to think either calmly or fairly. Government is a matter of common counsel, and everyone must come into the consultation with the purpose to yield to the general view, the view which seems most nearly to correspond with the common interest. If any decline frank conference, keep out, hold off, they must take the consequences and blame only themselves if they are in the end badly served."

"Key to success is a stable state, not a stable government."

"Public government, what you think of as the government—its job is just to keep the citizenry in line, make sure they don’t make trouble for the real government. Real government is private government. Its job is helping rich people to become more so."

"Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading."

"The Earth can no longer take this attack. We can no longer allow this thing to continue when it’s polluting the air, it’s polluting the water, polluting our food. ... The Earth gives us life, not the American government. The earth gives us life, not the multi-national corporate government. The Earth gives us life. We need to have the Earth. We must have it, otherwise our life will be no more. So we must resist what they do."

"Our obligations and loyalty should not be to a government that has proven time and time again that it is the enemy of the people unless the people are rich in dollars."

"There are insane people who wish to rule the world. They wish to continue to rule the world on violence and repression, and we are all the victims of that violence and repression."

"Bureaucracy and social harmony are inversely proportional to each other."

"From the time that the heads of government assumed an external and nominal Christianity, men began to invent all the impossible, cunningly devised theories by means of which Christianity can be reconciled with government. But no honest and serious-minded man of our day can help seeing the incompatibility of true Christianity — the doctrine of meekness, forgiveness of injuries, and love — with government, with its pomp, acts of violence, executions, and wars. The profession of true Christianity not only excludes the possibility of recognizing government, but even destroys its very foundations."

"Government is violence, Christianity is meekness, non-resistance, love. And, therefore, government cannot be Christian, and a man who wishes to be a Christian must not serve government."

"[Administration] covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, guided; men are seldom restrained from acting, such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to be nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which government is the shepherd."

"I heartily accept the motto, "That government is best which governs least"; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe, "That government is best which governs not at all"; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have."

"The government cannot bestow dignity, and it cannot take it away."

"Bills were passed, not only for national objects but for individual cases, and laws were most numerous when the commonwealth was most corrupt."

"Violence is the left hand of government."

"The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual, crime."

"Government is theoretically a constitutional system of checks and balances between equally powerful branches. But what government actually is, is an overly-complicated, byzantine, bureaucratic maze of rules, loopholes to those rules, and norms; complex enough that 🄐 if you want to find a rule that keeps you from doing something, you'll find it; and 🄑 if you actually want to do something, you can find a loophole to get around said rule. And then the norms are just how often you've had to pull any of this shit."

"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."

"With the exception of the writ of habeas corpus, a privilege not required under the Jewish government, simply because it did not allow of imprisonment, there is not a single feature of free government that is not distinctly developed in the Bible."

"Can any one feel any respect for a government that accords rights only to the privileged classes, and none to the workers?"

"Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all."

"Why, this it is, when men are rul'd by women."

"How, in one house, Should many people, under two commands, Hold amity? 'Tis hard; almost impossible."

"For government, through high and low and lower, Put into parts, doth keep in one consent, Congreeing in a full and natural close, Like music."

"Governments have three main economic functions in a market economy: 1. Governments increase efficiency by promoting competition, curbing externalities like pollution, and providing public goods. 2. Governments promote equity by using tax and expenditure programs to redistribute income toward particular groups. 3. Governments foster macroeconomic stability and growth—reducing unemployment and inflation while encouraging economic growth—through fiscal and monetary policy."

"Be thankful we're not getting all the government we're paying for."

"More people than ever before look to government as their best chance of securing well-being rather than as their inevitable enemy. Politics as a contest to capture state power has at times apparently replaced religion (sometimes even appearing to eclipse market economics) as the focus of faith that can move mountains."

"[S]ome people -- most, it seems -- will, under some circumstances, do anything someone in authority tells them to. ... Government institutions, like most humans, have a reflexive reaction to the exposure of internal corruption and wrongdoing: No matter how transparent the effort, their first response is to lie, conceal and cover up. Also like human beings, once an institution has embraced a particular lie in support of a particular coverup, it will forever proclaim its innocence."

"As the saying goes, a government that robs Peter to pay Paul can count on getting Paul’s vote."

"In a free society, the primary role of government is to protect the God-given, inalienable, inherent rights of its citizens, including the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."