government quotes

Aesop: 

We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.

Albert Camus : 

By definition, a government has no conscience. Sometimes it has a policy, but nothing more.

Albert Einstein: 

The really valuable thing in the pageant of human life seems to me not the State but the creative, sentient individual, the personality; it alone creates the noble and the sublime. . . 

Aristotle: 

All who have meditated on the art of governing mankind have been convinced that the fate of empires depends on the education of youth.

Bella Abzug: 

If we get a government that reflects more of what this country is really about, we can turn the century -- and the economy -- around.

David E. Lilienthal: 

Centralization at the national capital or within a business undertaking always glorifies the importance of pieces of paper. This dims the sense of reality.

Edward R. Murrow: 

Our major obligation is not to mistake slogans for solutions.

Edward R. Murrow: 

A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves.

Elie Wiesel: 

It may well be that our means are fairly limited and our possibilities restricted when it comes to applying pressure on our government. But is this a reason to do nothing? Despair is nor an answer. Neither is resignation. Resignation only leads to indifference, which is not merely a sin but a punishment

Eugene McCarthy: 

The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is inefficiency. An efficient bureaucracy is the greatest threat to liberty.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt: 

The only sure bulwark of continuing liberty is a government strong enough to protect the interests of the people, and a people strong enough and well enough informed to maintain its sovereign control over the government.

George Bernard Shaw: 

Democracy is a form of government that substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.

George Jean Nathan: 

Bad officials are elected by good citizens who do not vote.

H. L. Mencken: 

I believe that liberty is the only genuinely valuable thing that men have invented, at least in the field of government, in a thousand years. I believe that it is better to be free than to be not free, even when the former is dangerous and the latter safe. I believe that the finest qualities of man can flourish only in free air – that progress made under the shadow of the policeman's club is false progress, and of no permanent value. I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave.

H. L. Mencken: 

As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their hearts desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
The Baltimore Evening Sun, July 26, 1920


Hubert H. Humphrey: 

It was once said that the moral test of Government is how that Government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped.

James Madison: 

A popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both.

Jane Auer: 

It may be true that the government that governs best governs least. Unfortunately, the same is also true of the government that governs worst.

John Adams: 

Laws for the liberal education of youth, especially for the lower classes of people, are so extremely wise and useful that to a humane and generous mind, no expense for this purpose would be thought extravagant.

John F. Kennedy: 

We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.

John Gardner: 

The citizen can bring our political and governmental institutions back to life, make them responsive and accountable, and keep them honest. No one else can.

Mark Twain: 

The government is merely a servant -- merely a temporary servant; it cannot be its prerogative to determine what is right and what is wrong, and decide who is a patriot and who isn't. Its function is to obey orders, not originate them.

Noam Chomsky: 

States are not moral agents, people are, and can impose moral standards on powerful institutions.

P. J. O'Rourke: 

If government were a product, selling it would be illegal.

Paul Martin: 

For years governments have been promising more than they can deliver, and delivering more than they can afford.

Paul Ricoeur: 

To put it in a few words, the true malice of man appears only in the state and in the church, as institutions of gathering together, of recapitulation, of totalization.

Robert Coles: 

Abraham Lincoln did not go to Gettysburg having commissioned a poll to find out what would sell in Gettysburg. There were no people with percentages for him, cautioning him about this group or that group or what they found in exit polls a year earlier. When will we have the courage of Lincoln?

Thomas Jefferson: 

I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions, but laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.

Thomas Jefferson: 

I know of no safe repository of the ultimate power of society but people. And if we think them not enlightened enough, the remedy is not to take the power from them, but to inform them by education.

Thomas Jefferson: 

The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only object of good government.

Thomas Jefferson: 

No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal rights of another, and this is all from which the laws ought to restrain him.

Thomas Jefferson: 

A wise and frugal government, which shall leave men free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor and bread it has earned -- this is the sum of good government.