Government Quotations

Quotations relating to government.

Showing 37 through 72 of 77 quotations in this category.

"I hope you are alive and unsentimental enough to look honestly at yourselves as American citizens and say that it is insulting to you and your relatives and your fellow citizens to let Osama bin Laden so dazzle and possess our president and our government and our society that he and his war can so disrupt our economy and our way of life."

-National security expert William M. Arkin

"I have never understood why the politicians who are most eager to send soldiers into harm's way are always depicted as their most ardent friends."

-Joe Conason

"We cannot continue to have trade policy in this country that does not take into account conditions of the workers and the environment. We have all sorts of protections in our trade laws to protect intellectual property. We have all sorts of rules in our trade laws to protect compact discs. If we had one-quarter of the same rights for a human being as we do for compact discs, we'd see a huge breakthrough in trade policy."

-Amy Dean

"On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."

-H. L. Mencken, in the Baltimore Sun, July 26, 1920

"In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia."

-George Orwell

"The Dems' 2004 'vision,' despite all the campaign slogans to the contrary, was Anything But Bush. And our strategy wasn't, 'It's the economy, stupid' or even, 'It's Iraq, stupid,' but rather, 'Isn't Bush stupid?' That was our 'vision.'"

-ZZ Packer

"History furnishes no example of a corporate state that has succeeded at anything but bringing untold misery on vast populations while enriching a small elite."

-James Halloran

"In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you. ... You have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to preserve, protect and defend it."

-Abraham Lincoln

"There is no bad economic turn a conservative cannot do unto his buddy in the working class, as long as cultural solidarity has been cemented over a beer."

-Thomas Frank, What's the Matter With Kansas?

"As quietly as possible a "shadow government" has been set up all around us, my friend. Its foundation is not the Constitution, but Executive Orders, Presidential Procalamations, Secret Acts, and Emergency Powers. It has all the tools to be an absolute tyranny. Those behind it (on both sides of the aisle) who crave power continue to move towards it, while we are distracted by so many other goings on."

-Jeff Head @ FreeRepublic.com

"Programs such as Medicare, public sanitation, and biomedical research bought you longer life and better health. Maybe, instead of asking what your country owes you at 65, you should ask what you owe your country."

-William Saletan

"What's weird is that all the best information we have about what's being done in our name with our tax money is due to leaks. It doesn't feel like democracy to me."

-timeOday, Slashdot.org

"Politics has become a game of meaningless, mindless battles, conducted by unscrupulous methods and people, designed to transform even the most serious policy debates into sport."

-Al Gore, May 2006

"It is one of history's great tragedies that American conservatism, born in part in resistance to Soviet torture, should end by endorsing it in America, by Americans."

-Andrew Sullivan

"This plea comes from the bottom of my heart. Every friend of freedom must be as revolted as I am by the prospect of turning the United States into an armed camp, by the vision of jails filled with casual drug users and of an army of enforcers empowered to invade the liberty of citizens on slight evidence."

-Milton Friedman

"Civil disobedience, that’s not our problem. Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves, and all the while the grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem."

-Howard Zinn

"Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac."

-George Orwell

"Never be deceived that the rich will allow you to vote away their wealth."

-Lucy Parsons

"Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone."

-John Maynard Keynes

"That government is best which governs the least, because its people discipline themselves."

-Thomas Jefferson

"Anyone who tells you that one political party has a monopoly on the best defense of our nation is committing a fraud on the American people."

-Gen. Wesley Clark

"The job of the president of the United States is not to love his wife; it's to manage a wide range of complicated issues."

-Matthew Yglesias

"The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself."

-Daniel Patrick Moynihan

""If you buy a loaf of bread from the 7-11, you get a written receipt. Why can't we get a receipt when choosing the leader of the free world?""

-Bartcop.com, on voting machines with no paper trail

"If you are required to kill someone today, on the promise of a political leader that someone else shall live in peace tomorrow, believe me, you are not only a double murderer, you are a suicide, too."

-Katherine Anne Porter

"See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime."

-Frederic Bastiat

"A ruling intelligentsia, whether in Europe, Asia or Africa, treats the masses as raw material to be experimented on, processed, and wasted at will."

-Eric Hoffer

"We must be 100 percent sure that every legal and technological method is provided to determine guilt in capital cases."

-Congressman Ray LaHood

"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich, as well as the poor, to sleep under the bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread."

-Anatole France

"Bush has legitimized a huge expansion of the welfare state, liberalizing immigration, and using force for democratization abroad. All the next Democratic president has to do to finish Bush's hard work is to raise taxes to pay for it all."

-Andrew Sullivan

"One of the greatest and most prolonged insults to human dignity the world has ever seen."

-Writer Matt Taibbi, on the 2004 US presidential race

"Dost thou not know, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed?"

-Count Oxenstierna

"Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force; like fire, a troublesome servant and a fearful master. Never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action."

-George Washington

"In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act."

-George Orwell

"I never would have agreed to the formulation of the Central Intelligence Agency back in forty-seven, if I had known it would become the American Gestapo."

-Harry Truman, 1961

"Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."

-George Orwell