Quotes About Government

I'm convinced that you never have to give up liberties to be safe. I think you're less safe when you give up your liberties.

When one gets in bed with government, one must expect the diseases it spreads.

We need to understand the more government spends, the more freedom is lost...Instead of simply debating spending levels, we ought to be debating whether the departments, agencies, and programs funded by the budget should exist at all.

Don't steal - the government hates competition!

Liberty is lost through complacency and a subservient mindset. When we accept or even welcome automobile checkpoints, random searches, mandatory identification cards, and paramilitary police in our streets, we have lost a vital part of our American heritage. America was born of protest, revolution, and mistrust of government. Subservient societies neither maintain nor deserve freedom for long.

It is no coincidence that the century of total war coincided with the century of central banking.

Mr. Speaker, I once again find myself compelled to vote against the annual budget resolution for a very simple reason: it makes government bigger.

When the federal government spends more each year than it collects in tax revenues, it has three choices: It can raise taxes, print money, or borrow money. While these actions may benefit politicians, all three options are bad for average Americans.

Ideas are very important to the shaping of society. In fact, they are more powerful than bombings or armies or guns. And this is because ideas are capable of spreading without limit. They are behind all the choices we make. They can transform the world in a way that governments and armies cannot. Fighting for liberty with ideas makes more sense to me than fighting with guns or politics or political power. With ideas, we can make real change that lasts.

When we give government the power to make medical decisions for us, we in essence accept that the state owns our bodies.

Freedom is living without government coercion. So when a politician talks about freedom for this group or that, ask yourself whether he is advocating more government action or less.

Failure of government programs prompts more determined effort, while the loss of liberty is ignored or rationalized away...whether is it is the war on poverty, drugs, terrorism...or the current Hitler of the day, an appeal to patriotism is used to convince the people that a little sacrifice of liberty, here or there, is a small price to pay...The results, though, are frightening and will soon become even more so.

And yet even among the friends of liberty, many people are deceived into believing that government can make them safe from all harm, provide fairly distributed economic security, and improve individual moral behavior. If the government is granted a monopoly on the use of force to achieve these goals, history shows that power is always abused. Every single time.

It is true that liberty is not free, nor is it easy. But tyranny - even varying degrees of it - is much more difficult, and much more expensive. The time has come to rein in the federal government, put it on a crash diet, and let the people keep their money and their liberty.

Real patriotism is a willingness to challenge the government when it's wrong.

It's amazing that people don't understand that the more the market is involved and the smaller the government, the lower the price, the better the distribution, and the higher the quality.

It is a dangerous notion that we need a government to protect us from ourselves.

A citizen walking through the airport today is bombarded with 1984-style propaganda messages that are designed to make us fear some amorphous threat and also be suspicious of others. The government designs these messages to make us feel dependent and heavily lorded over in every aspect of our lives. These messages are becoming ever more pervasive, hitting us even in grocery stores when we are shopping.

Government should never be able to do anything you can't do. If you can't steal from your neighbor, you can't send the government to steal for you.

I don't want to run your life, I don't know how to run your life, I don't have the authority to run your life, and the Constitution doesn't permit me to run your life.

I'm worried that the government might kill Edward Snowden with a drone. --Ron Paul

An idea whose time has come cannot be stopped by any army or any government

The idea that the government has services or goods that they can pass on is a complete farce. Governments have nothing. They can't create anything, they never have. All they can do is steal from one group and give it to another at the destruction of the principles of freedom, and we ought to challenge that concept.

government interventions create unintended consequences that lead to calls for further intervention, and so on into a destructive spiral of more and more government control.