Quotes About Government

Lincoln gives a lesson in adaptive leadership even to those of us who will never advocate for compensated emancipation. Facing an uproar over the cost of the government paying slaveholders for their slaves, Lincoln showed the COST OF THE STATUS QUO, which is generally overlooked by those who oppose change.

One of the cost of holding a Federal office was geographic isolation in the nation's capital.

I am against government by crony.

The Labor government of 1945, which was put in power by popular vote and did what the people wanted, was nearer the Marxist idea than any of the governments thrown up by revolution, French, Russian or other.

It is the duty of Her Majesty's government neither to flap nor to falter.

I was determined that no British government should be brought down by the action of two tarts.

I found the offer of a knighthood something that I couldn't possibly accept. I found it to be somehow squalid, a knighthood. There's a relationship to government about knights.

Most of the press is in league with government, or with the status quo.

side. In return, the kaiser's government would reward its new ally not only with "generous financial support" but with the reacquisition of Mexico's "conquered" territories—Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona—once the United States suffered its inevitable defeat.

The main essentials of a successful prime minister are sleep and a sense of history.

The health of thirty million African Americans is continually imperiled, partly because many eschew effective care rather than risk the tender mercies of government-sponsored medicine. Although many studies and abuses contributed to this iatrophobia, Tuskegee remains the iconic symbol of racialized medical abuse.

The government's War on Poverty has transformed poverty from a short-term misfortune into a career choice.

Libertarians know that a free country has nothing to fear from anyone coming in or going out - while a welfare state is scared to death of poor people coming in and rich people getting out.

I found that I was getting a warm reception for my message of freeing you from the income tax, releasing you from Social Security, ending the insane war on drugs, restoring gun rights, and reducing the federal government to just its constitutional functions.

Government is force, pure and simple. There's no way to sugar-coat that. And because government is force, it will attract the worst elements of society - people who want to use government to avoid having to earn their living and to avoid having to persuade others to accept their ideas voluntarily.

Left-wing politicians take away your liberty in the name of children and of fighting poverty, while right-wing politicians do it in the name of family values and fighting drugs. Either way, government gets bigger and you become less free.

If younger people see older people who haven't planned ahead and have to rely on charity, the young will be more likely to provide for the future. Today when someone plans poorly, the only consequence people see is a demand for more government.

The income tax is the biggest single intrusion suffered by the American people. It forces every worker to be a bookkeeper, to open his records to the government, to explain his expenses, to fear conviction for a harmless accounting error. Compliance wastes billions of dollars. It penalizes savings and creates an enormous drag on the U.S. economy. It is incompatible with a free society, and we aren't libertarians if we tolerate it.

The press is hostile to the idea of liberty. Most people in the press are for big government. Most people think that the solution to anything, whether it's health care problems, education, whatever it is -- it's got to be more government.

Obviously the answer to the threat of communism (or any other enemy) is not a stronger government to defend us but just the opposite. We'd be far safer if there were no government to conquer.

As Frederic Bastiat put it, "The State is the great fictitious entity by which everyone expects to live at the expense of everyone else."[8]

But the objective of freedom is quite realistic; only the methods have been wrong. Don't be awed by the government. Don't confront it directly. Don't organize.

If governments didn't coercively monopolize the market for protection, there'd undoubtedly be more forms of protection offered on a voluntary basis to those who feel threatened by organized crime.

If the dollars you lose in taxes are important to you, then what about the dollars you may be spending to perpetuate boxes you could get out of?