Quotes About Government

The politics of the Essays preach a conservatism natural in one who aspired to rule. Bacon wants a strong central power. Monarchy is the best form of government; and usually the efficiency of a state varies with the concentration of power.

The class war had turned democracy into a contest in legislative looting.

If the average man had had his way there would probably never have been any state. Even today he resents it, classes death with taxes, and yearns for that government which governs least. If he asks for many laws it is only because he is sure that his neighbor needs them; privately he is an Anarchist Unphilosophical, and thinks Laws in his own case superfluous.

The more a government strives to curtail freedom of speech, the more obstinately is it resisted; not indeed by the avaricious, . . . but by those whom good education, sound morality, and virtue have rendered more free.

Yet democracy is on the whole inferior to aristocracy.92 For it is based on a false assumption of equality; it "arises out of the notion that those who are equal in one respect (e.g., in respect of the law) are equal in all respects; because men are equally free they claim to be absolutely equal.

Magnanimity in politics," said Edmund Burke, "is not seldom the truest wisdom, and a great empire and little minds go ill together

But if the government itself is a chaos and an absurdity, if it rules without helping, and commands without leading,—how can we persuade the individual, in such a state, to obey the laws and confine his self-seeking within the circle of the total good?

Every form of government tends to perish by excess of its basic principle.

States are built not on the ideals but on the nature of men.

If the average man had had his way there would probably never have been any state. Even today he resents it, classes death with taxes, and yearns for that government which governs least. If he asks for many laws it is only because he is sure that his neighbor needs them; privately he is an unphilosophical anarchist, and thinks laws in his own case superfluous.

If a man asks for many laws it is only because he is sure that his neighbor needs them; privately he…thinks laws in his own case superfluous.

We recall Macaulay's warning that democracy would collapse when the poor used their electoral power to rob rich Peter to pay lazy Paul. Polybius expressed the same idea in 130 BC: When

The state is the soul of man enlarged under the microscope of history.

even a tax on the tax-collecting farmers general.

When liberty becomes license, dictatorship is near.

citizens could forget, while they went through all the forms of the dead Republic, that they were living under a military monarchy in which force was hidden so long as phrases could rule.

Political society has made the many the property of the few.

PM está excesivamente organizada y se basa en gran medida en una ineficiente burocracia absurda.

I am really sorry to see my Countrymen trouble themselves about Politics. If Men were Wise, the Most arbitrary Princes could not hurt them. If they are not wise, the Freest Government is compell'd to be a Tyranny. Princes appear to me to be Fools. Houses of Commons & Houses of Lords appear to me to be fools; they seem to me to be something Else besides Human life.

Here is my first principle of foreign policy: good government at home.

The New Deal, which gave unprecedented authority to intellectuals in government, was, in certain important respects, anti-intellectual. Without the activist faith, perhaps not nearly so much would have been achieved. [...] Yet the liberals, in their desire to free themselves from the tyranny of precedent and in their ardor for social achievement, sometimes walked the precipice of superficiality and philistinism.

Curiously, the failures of Communism are more often treated as a joke than as a tragedy.

He told us that most of our civic problems were problems brought on or exacerbated by government, not problems that could be solved by government. That, of course, is enduringly true. Only government can cause inflation, preserve monopoly, and punish enterprise.

people seemed to hold that the one sole end of the entire establishment of public office was to elect one man like Sheriff Hampton big enough or at least with sense and character enough to run the county and then fill the rest of the jobs with cousins and inlaws who had failed to make a living at everything else they ever tried.