Quotes About Government

Since the 1980s, we've been living in this era, really, of corporate rule, based on this idea that the role of government is to liberate the power of capital so that they can have as much economic growth as quickly as possible, and then all good things will flow from that.

allowed the government to conduct electronic surveillance inside the United States—"with the assistance of a communications service provider," in the words of that law—as long as the people communicating were "reasonably believed" to be outside the United States. The

Stone was no admirer of Snowden: he valued certain whistleblowers who selectively leaked secret information in the interest of the public good; but Snowden's wholesale pilfering of so many documents, of such a highly classified nature, struck him as untenable. Maybe Snowden was right and the government was wrong—he didn't know—but he thought no national security apparatus could function if some junior employee decided which secrets to preserve and which to let fly.

If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind?

Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.

But how is this legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime.

Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.

The mission of law is not to oppress persons and plunder them of their property, even thought the law may be acting in a philanthropic spirit. Its mission is to protect property.

The state is the great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else.

Life, faculties, production-in other words, individuality, liberty, property-this is man. And in spite of the cunning of artful political leaders, these three gifts from God precede all human legislation, and are superior to it.

Everyone wants to live at the expense of the state. They forget that the state lives at the expense of everyone.

Who would be free themselves must strike the blow...I urge you to fly to arms and smite to death the power that would bury the Government and your liberty in the same hopeless grave. This is your golden opportunity.

The arm of the Federal government is long, but it is far too short to protect the rights of individuals in the interior of distant States. They must have the power to protect themselves, or they will go unprotected, spite of all the laws the Federal government can put upon the national statute-book.

The northern people have been long connected with slavery; they have been linked to a decaying corpse; which has destroyed the moral health. The union of the government; the union of the north and the south, in the political parties; the union in the religious organizations of the land, have all served to deaden the moral sense of the northern people, and to impregnate them with sentiments and ideas forever in conflict with what as a nation we call genius of American institutions.

unless the whole structure of the government is changed from a government by States to something like a despotic central government, with power to control even the municipal regulations of States, and to make them conform to its own despotic will.

O que sempre tem feito do Estado um inferno na terra tem sido precisamente procurar o homem fazer dele o seu paraíso.

Everything the State says is a lie, and everything it has it has stolen.

State is the name of the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it lies; and this lie slips from its mouth: 'I, the state, am the people.

All modern philosophizing is political, policed by governments, churches, academics, custom, fashion, and human cowardice, all of which limit it to a fake learnedness.

That which now calls itself democracy differs from older forms of government solely in that it drives with new horses: the streets are still the same old streets, and the wheels are likewise the same old wheels.

Honor to the government, and obedience, and also to the crooked government! So desires good sleep. How can I help it, if power likes to walk on crooked legs?

nothing stands so much in the way of the production and propagation of the great philosopher by nature as does the bad philosopher who works for the state.

But the state tells lies in all the tongues of good and evil; and whatever it says it lies—and whatever it has it has stolen. Everything about it is false;

The old liberal rebelled against taxation without responsibility, the new liberal wants the taxation as a handout without responsibility.