68 Government Quotes

In the realm of governance and politics, the words of leaders, philosophers, and thinkers play a crucial role in shaping our understanding and perception of government. Insights gleaned from these voices transcend time, offering wisdom, warnings, and inspiration for current and future generations. In this post, we delve into a curated collection of the top 68 government quotes—an assemblage of profound reflections that capture the essence of governance, its complexities, and its impact on society. Whether you're a history buff, a student of political science, or simply someone who appreciates the power of words, these quotes are sure to provoke thought and offer valuable perspectives on the ever-evolving landscape of government.

1. “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.” - Dwight D. Eisenhower

2. “When they call the roll in the Senate, the Senators do not know whether to answer 'Present' or 'Not Guilty'.” - Theodore Roosevelt

3. “Taxation is robbery based on monopoly of weapons” - Robert Anton Wilson

4. “Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner.” - James Bovard

5. “Commerce with all nations, alliance with none, should be our motto.” - Thomas Jefferson

6. “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” - Jean Jacques Rousseau

7. “If there is ever a fascist takeover in America, it will come not in the form of storm troopers kicking down doors but with lawyers and social workers saying. "I'm from the government and I'm here to help.” - Jonah Goldberg

8. “You have to remember one thing about the will of the people: it wasn't that long ago that we were swept away by the Macarena.” - Jon Stewart

9. “I have no doubt that the nation has suffered more from undue secrecy than from undue disclosure. The government takes good care of itself.” - Daniel Schorr

10. “I hope that we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.” - Thomas Jefferson

11. “Our safety, our liberty, depends upon preserving the Constitution of the United States as our fathers made it inviolate. The people of the United States are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution, but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution.” - Abraham Lincoln

12. “In any government, interests precede truth.” - Toba Beta

13. “Always remember, Son, the best boss is the one who bosses the least. Whether it's cattle, or horses, or men; the least government is the best government. ” - Ralph Moody

14. “Representative government is artifice, a political myth, designed to conceal from the masses the dominance of a self-selected, self-perpetuating, and self-serving traditional ruling class.” - Giuseppe Prezzolini

15. “Winston Smith: Does Big Brother exist?O'Brien: Of course he exists.Winston Smith: Does he exist like you or me?O'Brien: You do not exist.” - George Orwell

16. “BARBARIC!” - Robert Byrd

17. “Roosevelt spoke eloquently, in his penetrating tenor, of those 'who at this very moment are denied the greater part of what the very lowest standards of today call the necessities of life . . . I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished,' he told the audience, '. . . The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.” - Susan Quinn

18. “The greatest patriotism is to tell your country when it is behaving dishonorably, foolishly, viciously.” - Julian Barnes

19. “The basic problem of the Christians in this country in the last eighty years or so, in regard to society and in regard to government, is that they have seen things in bits and pieces instead of totals.” - Francis A. Schaeffer

20. “One can see [...] that the so-called governing powers are cardboard characters that mask the true ruling factors of our culture. Of course, those who manipulate the nation are not stupid. Rulers throughout history are only as powerful as the people who support them allow them to be.” - Peter Moon

21. “Anyone even remotely suspect was interrogated, because interrogation is by far the most effective method of speedily banishing inappropriate thoughts from the mind.” - Olli Jalonen

22. “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money.” - Margaret Thatcher

23. “Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms.” - Groucho Marx

24. “We do need a system, and we do need you and your 'Bertos, and sometimes we need Sam to just come along and kick some ass. - Quinn” - Michael Grant

25. “I believe that in time we will have reached the point where we will deserve to be free of government.” - Jorge Luis Borges

26. “Governments are deemed to succeed or fail by how well they make money go round, regardless of whether it serves any useful purpose. They regard it as a sacred duty to encourage the country’s most revolting spectacle: the annual feeding frenzy in which shoppers queue all night, then stampede into the shops, elbow, trample and sometimes fight to be the first to carry off some designer junk which will go into landfill before the sales next year. The madder the orgy, the greater the triumph of economic management.” - George Monbiot

27. “The good guys had to operate on a higher level than the killers--just for society to keep track of who was who.” - Keith Ablow

28. “While the government is "studying" and funding and organizing its Big Thought, nothing is being done. But the citizen who is willing to Think Little, and, accepting the discipline of that, to go ahead on his own, is already solving the problem. A man who is trying to live as a neighbor to his neighbors will have a lively and practical understanding of the work of peace and brotherhood, and let there be no mistake about it - he is doing that work...A man who is willing to undertake the discipline and the difficulty of mending his own ways is worth more to the conservation movement than a hundred who are insisting merely that the government and the industries mend their ways.(pg.87, "Think Little")” - Wendell Berry

29. “No power of government ought to be employed in the endeavor to establish any system or article of belief on the subject of religion.” - Jeremy Bentham

30. “The government cannot give to anybody anything that thegovernment does not first take from somebody else.” - Adrian Rogers

31. “Governments will be provided with the choice of either accommodating themselves to co-ordinating proliferating human variety or seeking to reduce that variety by repressive measures.” - Peter J. Carroll

32. “Strange that men, from age to age, should consent to hold their lives at the breath of another, merely that each in his turn may have a power of acting the tyrant according to the law! Oh, God! give me poverty! Shower upon me all the imaginary hardships of human life! I will receive them with all thankfulness. Turn me a prey to the wild beasts of the desert, so I be never again the victim of man, dressed in the gore-dripping robes of authority! Suffer me at least to call life, the pursuits of life, my own! Let me hold it at the mercy of the elements, of the hunger of the beasts, or the revenge of barbarians, but not of the cold-blooded prudence of monopolists and kings!” - William Godwin

33. “Those who made the decisions with imperfect knowledge will be judged in hindsight by those with considerably more information at their disposal and time for reflection.” - Donald Rumsfeld

34. “...Obama said, 'I welcome debate among my team, but I won't tolerate division.” - Bob Woodward

35. “If ever a time should come, when vain and aspiring men shall possess the highest seats in Government, our country will stand in need of its experienced patriots to prevent its ruin.” - Samuel Adams

36. “Government can only reign over a classes-divided society.” - Toba Beta

37. “It is not the function of our Government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the Government from falling into error.” - Robert H. Jackson

38. “Corruption is uniquely reprehensible in a democracy because it violates the system's first principle, which we all learned back in the sunshiny days of elementary school: that the government exist to serve the public, not particular companies or individuals or even elected officials. ” - Thomas Frank

39. “The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work and then they get elected and prove it.” - P.J. O'Rourke

40. “In fact, if law were restricted to protecting all persons, all liberties, and all properties; if law were nothing more than the organized combination of the individual's right to self-defense; if law were the obstacle, the check, the punisher of all oppression and plunder — is it likely that we citizens would then argue much about the extent of the franchise?” - Frederic Bastiat

41. “As nature has uncovered from under this hard shell the seed for which she most tenderly cares - the propensity and vocation to free thinking - this gradually works back upon the character of the people, who thereby gradually become capable of managing freedom; finally, it affects the principles of government, which finds it to its advantage to treat men, who are now more than machines, in accordance with their dignity.” - Immanuel Kant

42. “I doubt that my sense of personal freedom is any stronger than anybody else's. I'm happy to respect authority when it's genuine authority, based on moral or intellectual or even technical superiority. I'm eager to follow a hero if we can find one. But I tend to resist or evade any kind of authority based merely on the power to coerce. Government, for example. The Army tried to train us to salute the uniform, not the man. Failed. I will salute the man, maybe, if I think he's worthy of it, but I don't salute uniforms anymore.” - Edward Abbey

43. “Our lives are led, and our decisions made, within a network of needs and wants, some natural, some arising from the acts of others, some aggravated by the acts of the state. We are all bored, or threatened, or tantalized in differing degrees by a perilous world, some hostile people, and a not very sensitive government.” - Carl Cohen

44. “Many people consider the things government does for them to be social progress but they regard the things government does for others as socialism."[Address to National Press Club in Washington DC, as quoted in Freedom and Union (April 1952)]” - Earl Warren

45. “The advantages of a hereditary Monarchy are self-evident. Without some such method of prescriptive, immediate and automatic succession, an interregnum intervenes, rival claimants arise, continuity is interrupted and the magic lost. Even when Parliament had secured control of taxation and therefore of government; even when the menace of dynastic conflicts had receded in to the coloured past; even when kingship had ceased to be transcendental and had become one of many alternative institutional forms; the principle of hereditary Monarchy continued to furnish the State with certain specific and inimitable advantages.Apart from the imponderable, but deeply important, sentiments and affections which congregate around an ancient and legitimate Royal Family, a hereditary Monarch acquires sovereignty by processes which are wholly different from those by which a dictator seizes, or a President is granted, the headship of the State. The King personifies both the past history and the present identity of the Nation as a whole. Consecrated as he is to the service of his peoples, he possesses a religious sanction and is regarded as someone set apart from ordinary mortals. In an epoch of change, he remains the symbol of continuity; in a phase of disintegration, the element of cohesion; in times of mutability, the emblem of permanence. Governments come and go, politicians rise and fall: the Crown is always there. A legitimate Monarch moreover has no need to justify his existence, since he is there by natural right. He is not impelled as usurpers and dictators are impelled, either to mesmerise his people by a succession of dramatic triumphs, or to secure their acquiescence by internal terrorism or by the invention of external dangers. The appeal of hereditary Monarchy is to stability rather than to change, to continuity rather than to experiment, to custom rather than to novelty, to safety rather than to adventure.The Monarch, above all, is neutral. Whatever may be his personal prejudices or affections, he is bound to remain detached from all political parties and to preserve in his own person the equilibrium of the realm. An elected President – whether, as under some constitutions, he be no more than a representative functionary, or whether, as under other constitutions, he be the chief executive – can never inspire the same sense of absolute neutrality. However impartial he may strive to become, he must always remain the prisoner of his own partisan past; he is accompanied by friends and supporters whom he may seek to reward, or faced by former antagonists who will regard him with distrust. He cannot, to an equal extent, serve as the fly-wheel of the State.” - Harold Nicholson

46. “Government was founded on the working premiss of being primarily an asylum for ineptitude and indigence.” - William Faulkner

47. “We're supposed to strive for harmony, and that's what the art of tea is supposed to accomplish... but harmony is very, very difficult to achieve in this country. Tea ceremony is powerless. But it's also not such a bad thing either. You should enjoy it while you can.” - Koushun Takami

48. “This book (Jarod Kintz's book) is trash. I mean, I assume it is, because that's where I found it while scrounging for lunch. However, I must admit that I haven't read it. I would have, but I am homeless, mainly due to my illiteracy (though Big Government, Keynesian monetary policy, and my struggle with alcoholism certainly played a large role).” - Dora J. Arod

49. “With the tools of democracy, democracy was murdered and lawlessness made "legal." Raw power ruled, and its only real goal was to destroy all other powers besides itself.” - Eric Metaxas

50. “Before God and high heaven, is there a law for one man which is not a law for every other man?” - Howard Zinn

51. “That government is best which governs least.” - Thomas Paine

52. “Governments do not create, individuals create. Every invention was once just a thought inside someones head.” - William J Federer

53. “Our government needs the church, because only those humble enough to admit they're sinners can bring democracy the tolerance it requires to survive” - Ronald Reagan

54. “I can retain neither respect nor affection for government which has been moving from wrong to wrong in order to defend its immorality” - Mahatma Gandhi

55. “The state was made for man, not man for state.” - Albert Einstein

56. “A country of free men is not free if they are owned by somebody else.” - Joseph P. Sekula

57. “Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns in to universal, rather than religion-specific, values... it requires that their proposals be subject to argument and amenable to reason.Now I may be opposed to abortion for religious reasons, to take one example, but if I seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or evoke God's will. I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all.” - Barack Obama

58. “The degree of liberty or tyranny in any government is in large degree a reflection of the relative determination of the subjects to be free and their willingness and ability to resist efforts to enslave them.” - Gene Sharp

59. “The creators of the Constitution were not purple-robed scholars, sitting in their ivory towers attempting to put abstract theories into play, but men who had come to realize that their system of government was broken. These men desired desperately to repair it.” - C.L. Gammon

60. “Liberty may be gained, but can never be recovered." (Bk2:8)” - Jean Jacques Rousseau

61. “The desire to avoid short-term hardships leads to major dislocations in [housing] markets.” - Richard Epstein

62. “Have you ever stopped to ponder the amount of blood spilt, the volume of tears shed, the degree of pain and anguish endured, the number of noble men and women lost in battle so that we as individuals might have a say in governing our country?  Honor the lives sacrificed for your freedoms. Vote.” - Richelle E. Goodrich

63. “The Army's new pitch was simple. Good pay, good benefits, a manageable amount of adventure... but don't worry, we're not looking to pick fights these days. For a country that had paid so dear a price for its recent military buccaneering, the message was comforting. We still had the largest and most technologically advanced standing army in the world, the most nuclear weapons, the best and most powerful conventional weapons systems, the biggest navy. At the same time, to the average recruit the promise wasn't some imminent and dangerous combat deployment; it was 288 bucks a month (every month), training, travel, and experience. Selling the post-Vietnam military as a career choice meant selling the idea of peacetime service. It meant selling the idea of peacetime. Barf.” - Rachel Maddow

64. “Here then is an infallible criterion, by which the nation may judge of the intentions of those who govern it ... if they corrupt the morals of the people, spread a taste for luxury, effeminacy, a rage for licentious pleasures, - if they stimulate the higher orders to a ruinous pomp and extravagance, - beware, citizens! beware of those corruptors! they only aim at purchasing slaves in order to exercise over them an arbitrary sway.” - Emer De Vattel

65. “[David] Maraniss sees [Barack] Obama as a man with "a moviegoer's or writer's sensibility, where he is both participating and observing himself participating, and views much of the political process as ridiculous or surreal, even as he is deep into it.” - Jane Mayer

66. “The path to a sustained victory in Afghanistan lies in improving their economy, creating jobs for the Afghanis, strengthening their government and national services, getting the provinces to trust each other and work together, and eliminating the opium trade. Previously, the United States' policy was to not get deeply involved in internal Afghani drug issues; now we've changed the policy and are actively working to eradicate the drugs. But nobody has yet to come up with a way to shut down the poppy fields and get the Afghani people back to work. Until that happens, the Taliban will inevitable creep back in.” - Michael DeLong

67. “For forms of Government let fools contest. Whate'er is best administered is best.” - Alexander Pope

68. “Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the form of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question.” - Thomas Jefferson