Government Quotes

“If men were angels, no government would be necessary.”

— James Madison

“Political chaos is connected with the decay of language. One can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end.”

— George Orwell

“There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.”

— John Adams

“Compromise makes a good umbrella, but a poor roof; it is a temporary expedient, often wise in party politics, almost sure to be unwise in statesmanship.”

— James Russell Lowell

“The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.”

— Winston Churchill

“Sell a country! Why not sell the air, the great sea, as well as the earth? Did not the Great Spirit make them all for the use of his children?”

— Tecumseh

“Whatever makes men good Christians makes them good citizens.”

— Daniel Webster

“When there is an income tax, the just man will pay more and the unjust less on the same amount of income.”

— Plato

“We have the best government that money can buy.”

— Mark Twain

“Democracy is the road to socialism.”

— Karl Marx

“The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money.”

— Alexis de Tocqueville

“A politician is the devil's quilted anvil; he fashions all sins on him, and the blows are never heard.”

— John Webster

“I always voted at my party's call, and I never thought of thinking for myself at all.”

— William Gilbert

“I am not a communist, and neither is the revolutionary movement.”

— Fidel Castro

“There is no such thing as a good tax.”

— Winston Churchill

“An educated people can be easily governed.”

— Frederick the Great

“All war represents a failure of diplomacy.”

— Tony Benn

“The law always limits every power it gives.”

— David Hume

“A party of order or stability and a party of progress or reform are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life.”

— John Stuart Mill

“Nations, like individuals, are punished for their transgressions.”

— Ulysses S. Grant

“You cannot control your own population by force, but it can be distracted by consumption.”

— Noam Chomsky

“The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly.”

— Abraham Lincoln

“The more laws, the less justice.”

— Marcus Tullius Cicero

“The more laws, the less justice.”

— Marcus Tullius Cicero

“It was a weak spot in any nation to have a large body of disaffected people within its confusion.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

“Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.”

— Noam Chomsky

“The soldiers never explained to the government when an Indian was wronged, but reported the misdeeds of the Indians.”

— Geronimo

“The most terrifying words in the English language are: 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'”

— Ronald Reagan

“Those who own the country ought to govern it.”

— John Jay

“The best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch the currency.”

— Vladimir Lenin

“Your representative owes you not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays instead of serving you if he sacrifices it to your opinion.”

— Edmund Burke

“When a nation is filled with strife, then do patriots flourish.”

— Lao Tzu

“Every bad precedent originated as a justifiable measure.”

— Sallust

“It is not wisdom, but authority that makes a law.”

— Thomas Hobbes

“From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.”

— Karl Marx

“Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you.”

— Pericles

“The most terrifying words in the English language are: 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'”

— Ronald Reagan

“A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.”

— George Bernard Shaw

“War is merely the continuation of politics by other means.”

— Carl von Clausewitz

“People tend to forget their duties but remember their rights.”

— Indira Gandhi

“Real liberty is neither found in despotism or the extremes of democracy, but in moderate governments.”

— Alexander Hamilton

“We make a great mistake in supposing all people are capable of self-government.”

— John C. Calhoun

“The income tax created more criminals than any other single act of government.”

— Barry Goldwater

“The best government is a benevolent tyranny tempered by an occasional assassination.”

— Voltaire

“A popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce, or a tragedy, or perhaps both.”

— James Madison

“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”

— H.L. Mencken

“Man is by nature a political animal.”

— Aristotle

“An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.”

— Plutarch

“The first requisite of a good citizen in this republic of ours is that he shall be able and willing to pull his own weight.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

“This Bible is for the government of the people, by the people, and for the people.”

— John Wycliffe

“Laws must be clear, precise, and uniform for all citizens.”

— Marquis de Lafayette

“I believe that all government is evil and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time.”

— H.L. Mencken

“Wherever an altar is found, there civilization exists.”

— Joseph de Maistre

“I am against any reconciliation with Israel.”

— Hassan Nasrallah

“The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.”

— Winston Churchill

“Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people, by the people, for the people.”

— Oscar Wilde

“The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money.”

— Margaret Thatcher

“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.”

— Anatole France

“Democracy is indispensable to socialism.”

— Vladimir Lenin

“When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, we shall become as corrupt as Europe.”

— Thomas Jefferson

“Democracy is worth dying for, because it's the most deeply honorable form of government ever devised by man.”

— Ronald Reagan

“Politics is not a game; it is an earnest business.”

— Winston Churchill

“If you have ten thousand regulations, you destroy all respect for the law.”

— Winston Churchill

“You'll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race.”

— George Bernard Shaw

“The meaning of peace is the absence of opposition to socialism.”

— Karl Marx

“This city is what it is because our citizens are what they are.”

— Plato

“Fear is the foundation of most governments.”

— John Adams

“It is vain to talk of the interest of the community without understanding what is the interest of the individual.”

— Jeremy Bentham

“Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.”

— Franz Kafka

“Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.”

— Henry David Thoreau

“The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.”

— Tacitus

“That government is best which governs least.”

— Henry David Thoreau

“Here, sir, the people govern. Here, they act by their immediate representatives.”

— Alexander Hamilton

“Christianity is part of the common law.”

— James Wilson

“The best government is that which teaches us to govern ourselves.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“It is not in the nature of politics that the best men should be elected; the best men do not want to govern their fellowmen.”

— George MacDonald

“The ignorance of one voter in a democracy impairs the security of all.”

— John F. Kennedy

“The family is the first essential cell of human society.”

— Pope John XXIII

“Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government, owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

“I am dying, but the state remains.”

— Louis XIV

“History, in general, only informs us of what bad government is.”

— Thomas Jefferson

“The argument of the broken window pane is the most valuable argument in modern politics.”

— Emmeline Pankhurst

“Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.”

— Benito Mussolini

“The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants.”

— Albert Camus

“This used to be a government of checks and balances; now it's all checks and no balances.”

— Gracie Allen

“It has been said that politics is the second oldest profession. I have learned that it bears a striking resemblance to the first.”

— Ronald Reagan

“If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.”

— James Madison

“Democracy gives every man the right to be his own oppressor.”

— James Russell Lowell

“You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war.”

— Albert Einstein

“Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.”

— H.L. Mencken

“The punishment which the wise suffer who refuse to take part in the government is to live under the government of worse men.”

— Plato

“The people and the people alone are the motive force in the making of world history.”

— Mao Zedong

“Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.”

— George Bernard Shaw

“There is no distinctly American criminal class except Congress.”

— Mark Twain

“One country, one constitution, one destiny.”

— Daniel Webster

“Of all the enemies of public liberty, war is perhaps the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other.”

— James Madison

“Those who say religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion is.”

— Mahatma Gandhi

“For forms of government let fools contest; whatever is best administered is best.”

— Alexander Pope

“They talk about the failure of socialism, but where is the success of capitalism in Africa, Asia, and Latin America?”

— Fidel Castro

“War is the continuation of politics by other means.”

— Karl von Clausewitz

“Tyranny and anarchy are never far apart.”

— Jeremy Bentham

“I have come to the conclusion that politics are too serious a matter to be left to the politicians.”

— Charles de Gaulle

“The most terrifying words in the English language are: 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'”

— Ronald Reagan

“Democracy does not guarantee equality of conditions; it only guarantees equality of opportunity.”

— Irving Kristol

“It's not tyranny we desire; it's a just, limited federal government.”

— Alexander Hamilton

“Laws are silent in time of war.”

— Marcus Tullius Cicero

“The best form of government is that which is most likely to prevent the greatest sum of evil.”

— James Monroe

“A government of laws, and not of men.”

— John Adams

“Government is like a baby: an alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.”

— Ronald Reagan

“Democracy is beautiful in theory; in practice, it is a fallacy.”

— Benito Mussolini

“If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.”

— Charles Darwin

“Every country has the government it deserves.”

— Joseph de Maistre

“I ask, sir, what is the militia? It is the whole people, except for a few public officials.”

— George Mason

“I think when you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody.”

— Barack Obama

“Capitalism has worked very well. Anyone who wants to move to North Korea is welcome.”

— Bill Gates

“To plunder, to slaughter, to steal, these things they misname empire; and where they make a wilderness, they call it peace.”

— Tacitus

“Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.”

— James Joyce

“No man is above the law and no man is below it; nor do we ask any man's permission when we ask him to obey it.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

“When a law is in its nature a contract, when absolute rights have vested under that contract, a repeal of the law cannot divest those rights.”

— John Marshall

“Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught.”

— Honoré de Balzac

“Politics is perhaps the only profession for which no preparation is thought necessary.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

“Collecting more taxes than is absolutely necessary is legalized robbery.”

— Calvin Coolidge

“The liberties of a people never were, nor ever will be, secure when the transactions of their rulers may be concealed from them.”

— Patrick Henry

“London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

“The way my luck is running, if I was a politician I would be honest.”

— Rodney Dangerfield

“A national debt, if it is not excessive, will be to us a national blessing.”

— Alexander Hamilton

“True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

“Government has no other end but the preservation of property.”

— John Locke

“We're no longer in the Cold War; eavesdropping on friends is unacceptable.”

— Vladimir Putin

“War is a massacre of people who don't know each other for the profit of people who know each other but don't massacre each other.”

— Paul Valéry

“Laws made by common consent must not be trampled on by individuals.”

— George Washington

“Law is an ordinance of reason for the common good, made by him who has care of the community.”

— Thomas Aquinas

“The test of the morality of a society is what it does for its children.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“America is at that awkward stage; it's too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards.”

— Claire Wolfe

“The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world that it leaves to its children.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“No government ought to be without censors and where the press is free no one ever will.”

— Thomas Jefferson

“Political freedom without economic equality is a pretense, a fraud, a lie, and the workers want no lying.”

— Mikhail Bakunin

“Democracy means government by the uneducated, while aristocracy means government by the badly educated.”

— G.K. Chesterton

“It's not the voting that's democracy; it's the counting.”

— Tom Stoppard

“Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.”

— Mark Twain

“In a democracy, dissent is an act of faith.”

— J. William Fulbright

“The goal of socialism is communism.”

— Vladimir Lenin

“Any law which violates the inalienable rights of man is essentially unjust and tyrannical; it is not a law at all.”

— Maximilien Robespierre

“Government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

— Abraham Lincoln

“One-fifth of the people are against everything all the time.”

— Robert Kennedy

“Justice in the life and conduct of the state is possible only as first it resides in the hearts and souls of the citizens.”

— Plato

“Peace is a natural effect of trade.”

— Montesquieu

“There are no morals in politics; there is only expedience. A scoundrel may be of use to us just because he is a scoundrel.”

— Vladimir Lenin

“Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

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

— Frédéric Bastiat

“Men must be governed by God or they will be ruled by tyrants.”

— William Penn

“The war has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage.”

— Hirohito

“Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny.”

— Edmund Burke

“One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.”

— Plato

“My country has contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.”

— John Adams

“I have wondered at times what the Ten Commandments would have looked like if Moses had run them through the U.S. Congress.”

— Ronald Reagan

“Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.”

— Thomas Sowell

“Those who want to reap the benefits of this great nation must bear the fatigue of supporting it.”

— Thomas Paine

“Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy; its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.”

— Winston Churchill

“The Constitution shall never be construed to prevent the people of the United States who are peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms.”

— Samuel Adams

“There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured with what is right in America.”

— William J. Clinton

“It is the knowledge that all men have weaknesses, and that many have vices, that makes government necessary.”

— James Monroe

“Don't interfere with anything in the Constitution that must be maintained, for it is the only safeguard of our liberties.”

— Abraham Lincoln

“What is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?”

— James Madison

“A fool and his money are soon elected.”

— Will Rogers

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

— Frédéric Bastiat

“Politics is war without bloodshed, while war is politics with bloodshed.”

— Mao Zedong

“If history could teach us anything, it would be that private property is inextricably linked with civilization.”

— Ludwig von Mises

“Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.”

— Mark Twain

“The strength of a nation derives from the integrity of the home.”

— Confucius

“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

— George Orwell

“Politics is the art of the possible.”

— Otto von Bismarck

“So long as we have enough people in this country willing to fight for their rights, we'll be called a democracy.”

— Roger Nash Baldwin

“Nothing is more surprising than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few.”

— David Hume

“The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive.”

— Thomas Jefferson

“Governing a great nation is like cooking a small fish; too much handling will spoil it.”

— Lao Tzu

“I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.”

— Thomas Jefferson

“Health and education are always issues.”

— Helen Clark

“The method of political science is the interpretation of life; its instrument is insight, a nice understanding of subtle, unformulated conditions.”

— Woodrow Wilson

“Every war, when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac.”

— George Orwell

“Politics have no relation to morals.”

— Niccolò Machiavelli

“What about Jesus Christ? I say that he was a precursor of idealists, a precursor of socialists.”

— Mikhail Gorbachev

“It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me, and I think that's pretty important.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

“Nationalism is an infantile disease, it is the measles of mankind.”

— Albert Einstein

“Civilized society is perpetually menaced with disintegration through this primary hostility of men towards one another.”

— Sigmund Freud

“I love America more than any other country in this world; and exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”

— James A. Baldwin

“If Hitler invaded hell, I would make at least a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.”

— Winston Churchill

“In republics, the great danger is that the majority may not sufficiently respect the rights of the minority.”

— James Madison

“Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards.”

— Max Weber

“The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have little.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

“It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment.”

— Ansel Adams

“We cannot be both the world's leading champion of peace and the world's leading supplier of the weapons of war.”

— Jimmy Carter

“Loyalty to the nation all the time, loyalty to the government when it deserves it.”

— Mark Twain

“In times of war, the laws are silent.”

— Quintus Tullius Cicero

“Inflation is taxation without legislation.”

— Milton Friedman

“War is not an independent phenomenon, but the continuation of politics by different means.”

— Clausewitz

“Government's first duty is to protect the people, not run their lives.”

— Ronald Reagan

“Governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deducted from it.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

“The state is not abolished, it withers away.”

— Friedrich Engels

“Airplanes are interesting toys, but of no military value.”

— Ferdinand Foch

“You must obey the law always, not only when they grab you by your special place.”

— Vladimir Putin

“Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.”

— Thomas Paine

“We prefer world law in the age of self-determination to world war in the age of mass extermination.”

— John F. Kennedy

“Politics is war without bloodshed, while war is politics with bloodshed.”

— Mao Zedong

“My brother Bob doesn't want to be in government; he promised Dad he'd go straight.”

— John F. Kennedy

“Justice in the life and conduct of the state is possible only as first it resides in the hearts and souls of the citizens.”

— Plato

“What the people want is very simple. They want an America as good as its promise.”

— Barbara Jordan

“Fascism should rightly be called corporatism, as it is the merger of corporate and government power.”

— Benito Mussolini

“Democracy is a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder, and dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequals alike.”

— Plato

“Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

“Fifty percent of people won't vote and fifty percent don't read newspapers. I hope it's the same fifty percent.”

— Gore Vidal

“All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.”

— Benito Mussolini

“Fear is the foundation of most governments.”

— John Adams

“Crime and bad lives are the measure of a state's failure. All crime in the end is the crime of the community.”

— H.G. Wells

“A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.”

— George Bernard Shaw

“The most practical kind of politics is the politics of decency.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

“The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.”

— Abraham Lincoln

“Fascism is capitalism in decay.”

— Vladimir Lenin

“A world without nuclear weapons would be less stable and more dangerous for all of us.”

— Margaret Thatcher

“The nation that destroys its soil destroys itself.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

“There is a providence that protects idiots, drunkards, children, and the United States of America.”

— Otto von Bismarck

“What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest.”

— Andy Warhol

“Notoriously, the United States is the most religious of the Western advanced nations; it's a bit mysterious why that is.”

— Richard Dawkins

“There is no crueler tyranny than that which is perpetuated under the shield of law and in the name of justice.”

— Montesquieu

“A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.”

— George Bernard Shaw

“Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.”

— Samuel Johnson

“There is no avoiding war; it can only be postponed to the advantage of others.”

— Niccolò Machiavelli

“Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations; entangling alliances with none.”

— Thomas Jefferson

“There is no such thing as society; there are individual men and women and there are families.”

— Margaret Thatcher

“Dictatorship naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme liberty.”

— Plato

“The more laws, the less justice.”

— Marcus Tullius Cicero

“A vote is like a rifle; its usefulness depends upon the character of the user.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

“Society cares for the individual only so far as he is profitable.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

“Politics should not interfere with sports, and sports should impact politics.”

— Vladimir Putin

“It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government, except all the others that have been tried.”

— Winston Churchill

“Never believe anything in politics until it has been officially denied.”

— Otto von Bismarck

“No civilized society can long exist with an active power in its bosom that is stronger than the law.”

— James Fenimore Cooper

“America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.”

— Georges Clemenceau

“Politics is just show business for ugly people.”

— Jay Leno

“A great country worthy of the name does not have any friends.”

— Charles de Gaulle

“A nation that destroys its soils destroys itself. Forests are the lungs of our land, purifying the air and giving fresh strength to our people.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

“The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only object of good government.”

— Thomas Jefferson

“I am sometimes a fox and sometimes a lion; the whole secret of government lies in knowing when to be the one or the other.”

— Napoleon Bonaparte

“Politics isn't about left versus right; it's about top versus bottom.”

— Jim Hightower

“The smallest states thrive by discord; the greatest are destroyed.”

— Sallust

“Politics is too serious a matter to be left to the politicians.”

— Charles de Gaulle

“Useless laws weaken the necessary laws.”

— Montesquieu

“If you want to study the social and political history of modern nations, study hell.”

— Thomas Merton

“In politics, never retreat, never retract, never admit a mistake.”

— Napoleon Bonaparte

“We are just statistics born to consume resources.”

— Horace

“In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.”

— George Orwell

“A nation that does not stand for its children does not stand for anything and will not stand tall in the future.”

— Marian Wright Edelman

“The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money.”

— Margaret Thatcher

“The Constitution is the guide which I never will abandon.”

— George Washington

“A politician is a man who understands government; a statesman is a politician who's been dead for 15 years.”

— Harry S. Truman

“We contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.”

— Winston Churchill

“In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

“There is no grievance that is a fit object of redress by mob law.”

— Abraham Lincoln

“In every state is a blessing; but government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.”

— Thomas Paine

“I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good.”

— Adam Smith

“We don't let them have ideas; why would we let them have guns?”

— Joseph Stalin

“Either one lives for politics or one lives off politics.”

— Max Weber

“Law is an ordinance of reason for the common good, made by him who has care of the community.”

— Thomas Aquinas

“Patriotism consists not in waving the flag, but in striving that our country shall be righteous as well as strong.”

— James Bryce

“Republics decline into democracies, and democracies degenerate into despotisms.”

— Aristotle

“Censorship, like charity, should begin at home; but unlike charity, it should end there.”

— Clare Boothe Luce

“I want to stay away from politics or else I'll probably end up putting my size fifteen foot into my mouth.”

— Peter Steele

“Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country.”

— Vladimir Lenin

“We are here not because we are law-breakers, we are here in our efforts to become law-makers.”

— Emmeline Pankhurst

“If we ever forget that we are one nation under God, then we will be a nation gone under.”

— Ronald Reagan

“Man is by nature a political animal.”

— Aristotle

“There can be no keener revelation of a society's soul than the way in which it treats its children.”

— Nelson Mandela

“Unless a nation's life faces peril, war is murder.”

— Mustafa Kemal Atatürk

“In the usual progress of things, the necessities of a nation in every stage of its existence will be found at least equal to its resources.”

— Alexander Hamilton

“A claim for equality of material position can be met only by a government with totalitarian powers.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek

“Votes should be weighed, not counted.”

— Friedrich Schiller

“We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.”

— Aesop

“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

— John Adams

“The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation.”

— Vladimir Lenin

“Under every stone lurks a politician.”

— Aristophanes

“The theory of communism may be summed up in one sentence: Abolish all private property.”

— Karl Marx

“No nation has friends, only interests.”

— Charles de Gaulle

“Our politics are our deepest form of expression; they mirror our past experiences and reflect our dreams and aspirations for the future.”

— Paul Wellstone

“The reason why men enter into society is the preservation of their property.”

— John Locke

“One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.”

— Plato

“The superior power of population cannot be checked without producing misery or vice.”

— Thomas Malthus

“Every actual state is corrupt. Good men must not obey laws too well.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Healthy citizens are the greatest asset any country can have.”

— Winston Churchill

“With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it, nothing can succeed.”

— Abraham Lincoln

“Politics is almost as exciting as war, and quite as dangerous. In war, you can only be killed once; but in politics, many times.”

— Winston Churchill

“A politician is an arse upon which everyone has sat except a man.”

— e.e. cummings

“Democracy passes into despotism.”

— Plato

“Law is nothing other than a certain ordinance of reason for the common good, promulgated by the person who has the care of the community.”

— Thomas Aquinas

“Men must turn square corners when they deal with the government.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

“Politics is the art of the possible.”

— Otto von Bismarck

“The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.”

— Abraham Lincoln

“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”

— H.L. Mencken

“A man's country is not a certain area of land, of mountains, rivers, and woods, but it is a principle; and patriotism is loyalty to that principle.”

— George William Curtis

“The ballot is stronger than the bullet.”

— Abraham Lincoln

“Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.”

— Milton Friedman

“The forces in a capitalist society, if left unchecked, tend to make the rich richer and the poor poorer.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

“I am a Marxist-Leninist and I will be one until the last day of my life.”

— Fidel Castro

“A week is a long time in politics.”

— Harold Wilson

“Ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad reputation.”

— Henry Kissinger

“The state comes into existence for the sake of life and continues to exist for the sake of the good life.”

— Aristotle

“A popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both.”

— James Madison

“Equality means nothing unless incorporated into the institutions.”

— Slobodan Milosevic

“How can anyone govern a nation that has two hundred and forty-six different kinds of cheese?”

— Charles de Gaulle

“Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it.”

— Mark Twain

“Tyranny naturally arises out of democracy.”

— Plato

“The good of the people is the greatest law.”

— Marcus Tullius Cicero

“America's health care system is neither healthy, caring, nor a system.”

— Walter Cronkite

“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies.”

— Groucho Marx

“The government is us; we are the government, you and I.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

“The basis of our political system is the right of the people to make and to alter their constitutions of government.”

— George Washington

“Loyalty to the country always. Loyalty to the government when it deserves it.”

— Mark Twain

“Politics makes strange bedfellows.”

— Charles Dudley Warner

“The most important political office is that of the private citizen.”

— Louis D. Brandeis

“Politics begin where the masses are, not where there are thousands, but where there are millions; that is where serious politics begin.”

— Vladimir Lenin

“The essence of government is power; and power lodged, as it must be, in human hands, will ever be liable to abuse.”

— James Madison

“Prisons are built with stones of law, brothels with the bricks of religion.”

— William Blake

“The illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer.”

— Henry Kissinger

“Politics is the entertainment branch of industry.”

— Frank Zappa

“The best government is that which teaches us to govern ourselves.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“War is the failure of diplomacy.”

— John Dingell

“Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.”

— John Adams

“If you put the Federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in five years there'd be a shortage of sand.”

— Milton Friedman

“A popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce, or a tragedy, or perhaps both.”

— James Madison

“Mr. Speaker, I rise today to recognize the Peace Corps as it reached its 45th anniversary on March 1, 2006.”

— Solomon Ortiz

“It will be a great day when our schools have all the money they need and our Air Force has to have a bake sale to buy a bomber.”

— Robert Fulghum

“When the state is most corrupt, then the laws are most multiplied.”

— Tacitus

“A family with the wrong members in control; that perhaps is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.”

— George Orwell

“The safety of the people shall be the highest law.”

— Marcus Tullius Cicero

“Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it.”

— Mark Twain

“It is not wisdom, but authority that makes a law.”

— Thomas Hobbes

“Why has government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint.”

— Alexander Hamilton

“If nominated, I will not run; if elected, I will not serve.”

— William Tecumseh Sherman

“Every society gets the kind of criminal it deserves. What is equally true is that every community gets the kind of law enforcement it insists on.”

— Robert Kennedy

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.”

— Edward Bernays

“When we assumed the soldier, we did not lay aside the citizen.”

— George Washington

“If we can but prevent the government from wasting the labours of the people under the pretence of taking care of them, they must become happy.”

— Thomas Jefferson

“Politics is not an exact science.”

— Otto von Bismarck

“Everything is politics.”

— Thomas Mann

“The second office in the government is honorable and easy; the first is but a splendid misery.”

— Thomas Jefferson

“Governments need to have both shepherds and butchers.”

— Voltaire

“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”

— Adam Smith

“The country that is more developed industrially only shows to the less developed the image of its own future.”

— Karl Marx

“Women are nothing but machines for producing children.”

— Napoleon Bonaparte

“As the family goes, so goes the nation, and so goes the whole world in which we live.”

— Pope John Paul II

“If God is just, I tremble for my country.”

— Thomas Jefferson

“It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished, unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.”

— Voltaire

“An oppressive government is more to be feared than a tiger.”

— Confucius

“The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.”

— Winston Churchill

“So long as there is imperialism in the world, a permanent peace is impossible.”

— Hassan Nasrallah

“Capital is reckless of the health or length of life of the laborer, unless under compulsion from society.”

— Karl Marx

“If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.”

— John F. Kennedy

“The administration of justice is the firmest pillar of government.”

— George Washington

“There is a specter haunting Europe—the specter of communism.”

— Karl Marx

“When a man assumes a public trust, he should consider himself a public property.”

— Thomas Jefferson

“The art of government consists of taking as much money as possible from one class of citizens to give to another.”

— Voltaire

“No man is good enough to govern another man without that other's consent.”

— Abraham Lincoln

“Anticipate charity by preventing poverty.”

— Maimonides

“Markets are lethal if only because of ignoring externalities: the impacts of their transactions on the environment.”

— Noam Chomsky

“In the long run, every government is the exact symbol of its people, with their wisdom and unwisdom. We have to say, 'Like people, like government.'”

— Thomas Carlyle

“The press should be not only a collective propagandist and a collective agitator, but also a collective organizer of the masses.”

— Vladimir Lenin

“Therefore, the good of man must be the end of the science of politics.”

— Aristotle

“England is a nation of shopkeepers.”

— Napoleon Bonaparte

“Politics is a profession; a serious, complicated, and in its true sense, a noble one.”

— Dwight D. Eisenhower

“I am persuaded you will permit me to observe that the path of true piety is so plain as to require but little political direction.”

— George Washington

“Order is manifestly maintained in the universe governed by the sovereign will of God.”

— James Prescott Joule

“War has rules. Mud wrestling has rules. Politics has no rules.”

— Ross Perot

“The happiness of society is the end of government.”

— John Adams

“We are bound to lose Ireland in consequence of years of cruelty, stupidity, and misgovernment; and I would rather lose her as a friend than as a foe.”

— William E. Gladstone

“A popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce, or a tragedy, or perhaps both.”

— James Madison

“Communism has never come to power in a country that was not disrupted by war or corruption or both.”

— John F. Kennedy

“The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.”

— Karl Marx

“Guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism.”

— George Washington

“Laws too gentle are seldom obeyed, and too severe seldom executed.”

— Benjamin Franklin

“Those who are politically apathetic can only survive if they are supported by people who are capable of taking action.”

— Pericles

“If they want peace, nations should avoid the pin pricks that precede cannon shots.”

— Napoleon Bonaparte

“Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made.”

— Otto von Bismarck

“Democracy is when the indigent, and not the men of property, are the rulers.”

— Aristotle

“The people are the government, administering it by their agents; they are the government, the sovereign power.”

— Andrew Jackson

Government Quotes

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