Quotes About Government

We establish no religion in this country, we command no worship, we mandate no belief. Nor will we ever. Church and state are, and must remain, separate. -- Ronald Reagan I do not believe in taking away the right of the citizen for sporting, for hunting and so forth, or for home defense. But I do believe that an AK-47, a machine gun, is not a sporting weapon or needed for defense of a home." -- Ronald Reagan

The problem is not that people are taxed too little, the problem is that government spends too much.

The government is like a baby's alimentary canal, with a happy appetite at one end and no responsibility at the other.

Tax increases don't eliminate deficits they increase govt. spending.

One legislator accused me of having a 19th-century attitude on law and order. That is a totally false charge. I have an 18th-century attitude. That is when the Founding Fathers made it clear that the safety of law-abiding citizens should be one of the government's primary concerns.

Concentrated power has always been the enemy of liberty

Doing for people what they can, and ought to do for themselves, is a dangerous experiment," the great labor leader Samuel Gompers said. "In the last analysis, the welfare of the workers depends on their own initiative." The classic "liberal" believed individuals should be masters of their own destiny and the least government is the best government; these are precepts of freedom and self-reliance that are at the root of the American way and the American spirit.

But instead, I decided to give a speech about the pride of giving and the importance of doing things without waiting for the government to do it for you. I pointed out that when individuals or private groups were involved in helping the needy, none of the contributions were spent on overhead or administrative costs, unlike government relief programs where $2 was often spent on overhead for every $1 that went to needy people.

One of the greatest of liberals, Thomas Jefferson, the founder of the Democratic Party, once remarked: "A wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned—this is the sum of good government.

the Polish people be allowed to have a voice in the kind of govt. they want. Under the Yalta Pact the Soviets agreed they & others would be allowed to do this. The Soviets have never honored that promise.

I'm from the government and I'm here to help.

Jefferson repeatedly said that the best government was the smallest government, that "governments are not the masters of the people, but the servants of the people governed.

People were tired of wasteful government programs and welfare chiselers; and they were angry about the constant spiral of taxes and government regulations, arrogant bureaucrats, and public officials who thought all of mankind's problems could be solved by throwing the taxpayers' dollars at them.

Estamos caminhando para o socialismo, um sistema que, como se diz, só funciona no Céu, onde não precisam dele, e no Inferno, onde ele já existe.

The taxpayer: That's someone who works for the federal government but doesn't have to take the civil service examination.

We have been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people. But if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else?

The nearest thing to eternal life we will ever see on this earth is a government program.

aren't lazy or unwilling to work: they just don't know how to free themselves from the welfare security blanket.

all of us need to be reminded that the federal government did not create the states, the states created the federal government. . .

A rebuke to Cong. "How could it be otherwise in a body to which the people send 150 lawyers whose trade it is to question everything, yield nothing & talk by the hour.

than the one between the United States and the United Kingdom. Not only did Margaret Thatcher and I become personal friends and share a similar philosophy about government; the alliance

Liberty has never come from government," Woodrow Wilson, one of FDR's predecessors and another Democrat, said. "The history of liberty is the history of limitation of government's power, not the increase of it.

As I have often said, governments don't produce economic growth, people do. What government can do is encourage Americans to tap their well of ingenuity and unleash their entrepreneurial spirit, then get out of the way.

As smart as he was, though, I suspect even FDR didn't realize that once you created a bureaucracy, it took on a life of its own. It was almost impossible to close down a bureaucracy once it had been created.