Quotes About Government

Now and then an innocent man is sent to the legislature.

Government does not have magic powers. In fact, the opposite is true; it is the least effective agency invented by man.

No man undertakes a trade he has not learned, even the meanest; yet everyone thinks himself sufficiently qualified for the hardest of all trades, that of government.

No provision in our Constitution ought to be dearer to man than that which protects the rights of conscience against the enterprises of the civil authority.

The walls are raised against honest men in civic life.

Some men hope for revolution but when you revolt and set up your new government you find your new government is still the same old Papa, he has only put on a cardboard mask.

Today the devil as a wolf in supposedly a new suit of sheep's clothing is enticing some men to parrot his line by advocating planned government guaranteed security at the expense of our liberties.

In a free society the state does not administer the affairs of men. It administers justice among men who conduct their own affairs.

A man should have a right to be religious if he wants to. The government should not be involved in those decisions.

Congress seems to want to cure every ill known to man except unconstitutional government and high taxes.

The law will never make a man free; it is men who have got to make the law free.

We really must keep under control, and pretty strict control, the area within which 'The Man in Whitehall' knows best.

States are as the men, they grow out of human characters.

We repose an unwise confidence in any government, or in any men, when we invest them officially with too much, or an unnecessary quantity of, discretionary power.

Our great Republic is a government of laws and not of men. Here, the people rule.

Fear is in almost all cases a wretched instrument of government, and ought in particular never to be employed against any order of men who have the smallest pretensions to independency.

If men want to oppose war, it is statism that they must oppose.

The government of man should be the monarchy of reason: it is too often the democracy of passions or the anarchy of humors.

Men do not make laws. They do but discover them.

Government is the people's business and every man, woman and child becomes a shareholder with the first penny of tax paid.

Did the mass of men know the actual selfishness and injustice of their rulers, not a government would stand a year. - The world would foment with revolution.

The man of great wealth owes a peculiar obligation to the state because he derives special advantages from the mere existence of government.

Excessive taxation . . . will carry reason & reflection to every man's door, and particularly in the hour of election.

Government cannot solve all our problems, even in normal times, much less during a catastrophe of nature that reminds man how little he is, despite all his big talk.