Quotes About Government

My parents are the last of the middle class. My father worked for the government designing sea mines. My mother was a substitute teacher. Together, they worked really only until they were sixty.

England is the Mother of Parliaments

'All men are created equal', 'government by consent of the governed', 'give me liberty or give me death'. Well, those are not just clever words, or those are not just empty theories.

There is hardly a political question in the United States which does not sooner or later turn into a judicial one.

The term "too big to fail" must be excised from our vocabulary.

I wish the government would put a tax on pianos for the incompetent.

Government is necessary, not because man is naturally bad... but because man is by nature more individualistic than social.

All men, among themselves, are by nature equal. The inequality we now discern hath its spring from the civil law.

Nature has placed mankind under the government of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure.

Why has government been instituted at all? Because the passions of man will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint.

When man lives under government, he is fallen, his worth is gone, and his nature tarnished.

No government power can be abused long. Mankind will not bear it.... There is a remedy in human nature against tyranny, that will keep us safe under every form of government.

We must make it an imperative duty of our government to protect the gifts which Nature has bestowed on America and to insure the maintenance of a clean, healthy, wholesome environment for our people.

Men at a distance, who have admired our systems of government unfounded in nature, are apt to accuse the rulers, and say that taxes have been assessed too high and collected too rigidly.

Government cannot close its eyes to the pollution of waters, to the erosion of soil, to the slashing of forests any more than it can close its eyes to the need for slum clearance and schools.

We are very fond of blaming the poor for destroying the environment. But often it is the powerful, including governments, that are responsible.

A free people [claim] their rights as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate.

The Republican form of government is the highest form of government: but because of this it requires the highest type of human nature, a type nowhere at present existing.

Rights are considered to have their source not in nature, but in law.

All restraints upon man's natural liberty, not necessary for the simple maintenance of justice, are of the nature of slavery, and differ from each other only in degree.

It is evident that the state is a creation of nature, and that man is by nature a political animal.

Property is in its nature timid and seeks protection, and nothing is more gratifying to government than to become a protector.

American agents... are the only persons authorized to hold councils of a political nature.

If we advert to the nature of republican government, we shall find that the censorial power is in the people over the government, and not in the government over the people.