Quotes About Government

Conservatives want to be your daddy, telling you what to do and what not to do. Liberals want to be your mommy, feeding you, tucking you in, and wiping your nose. Libertarians want to treat you as an adult.

every government intervention in the marketplace tends to reduce wealth and the overall standard of living.

Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Thus

A Government is not free to do as it pleases…. The law of nature stands as an eternal rule to all men, legislators as well as others.

On the contemporary American left-right spectrum, libertarianism is neither left nor right. Libertarians believe in individual freedom and limited government consistently, unlike either contemporary liberals or contemporary conservatives.

and the refusal of the Roosevelt administration to recognise the Japanese government imposed on Manchuria.

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

Corporations demand compliance assistance when government imposes new regulations. So, why can't poor folks get help to comply with voter ID laws?

There's a reason why kings built large palaces, sat on thrones and wore rubies all over. There's a whole social need for that, not to oppress the masses, but to impress the masses and make them proud and allow them to feel good about their culture, their government and their ruler so that they are left feeling that a ruler has the right to rule over them, so that they feel good rather than disgusted about being ruled. —George Lucas, New York Times, 1999

Of course none compare to the exponential growth unleashed by late-20th Century America's synergy of government, enterprise and unleashed individual competitiveness. One result was the first society transforming itself from the feudal pyramid of privilege to a diamond shape[227] whose vast and healthy and well-educated middle class proved to be the generator of nearly all our great accomplishments.

Government . . . consists of a nation's efforts to settle the differences amongst its component parts — its citizens.

Excuse me for being greedy, but I want freedom and good government.

Since the 1970s wealthy donors have heavily financed efforts to cut taxes and public spending. The success they've had helps explain why government now can't do as many things, which gives private funders new leverage in shaping society.

Even if big reforms do happen—say, a combination of tax hikes and spending cuts—the discretionary resources that government can deploy to tackle social or environmental problems are likely to keep falling for many years to come. In future decades, government is likely to spend much of its money cutting checks for seniors and bondholders.

For the first time there appeared on earth kings, dictators, high priests, emperors, prime ministers, presidents, governors, mayors, generals, admirals, police chiefs, judges, lawyers, and jailers, along with dungeons, jails, penitentiaries, and concentration camps. Under the tutelage of the state, human beings learned for the first time how to bow, grovel, kneel, and kowtow. In many ways the rise of the state was the descent of the world from freedom to slavery.

Producing laws is not an easier job than producing cars and food, so if the government is incompetent to produce cars or food, why do you expect it to do a good job producing the legal system within which you are then going to produce the cars and the food?

In eighteenth-century England a system of professional police and prosecutors, government paid and appointed, was viewed as potentially tyrannical—worse still, French.

Monopoly power exists only when a firm can control the prices charged by existing competitors and prevent the entry of new ones. The most effective way of doing so is by the use of government power. There are considerable elements of monopoly in our economy, but virtually all are produced by government and could not exist under institutions of complete private property.

From Ayn Rand to bushy anarchists there is an occasional agreement on means called libertarianism, which is a faith in laissez-faire politics/economics.... How to hate your government on principle.

It's all very well to put the government in the hands of the perfect man, but what do you do when the perfect man gets a bellyache?

It's all very well to put the government in the hands of the perfect man, but what do you do when the perfect man gets a belly-ache?' That's the major argument against any kind of absolutism.

if you think the corporations are evil and it's the government's job to make them moral, you're deflecting your own responsibility to civics. You're making the government your big brother and the corporation the evil bully your big brother's supposed to keep off you at recess.

It's probably part of my naïveté that I don't want to put the issue in political terms when it's probably irreducibly political. Something has happened where we've decided on a personal level that it's all right to abdicate our individual responsibility to the common good and let government worry about the common good while we all go about our individual self-interested business and struggle to gratify our various appetites.

Look for a candidate who can do to the electorate what corporations are learning to do, so Government—or, better, Big Government, Big Brother, Intrusive Government—becomes the image against which this candidate defines himself. Though