Most of the trouble in the world is caused by people wanting to be important. -- T.S. Eliot
All that is essential for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world: indeed it's the only thing that ever has! -- Margaret Meade
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself. -- Mark Twain, quoted in A.B. Paine's Mark Twain: A Biography (Harper, 1912, Vol. 2, page 724).
Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you. -- Pericles (430 B.C.)
I don't make jokes, I just watch the government and report the facts. -- Will Rogers
The mystery of government is not how Washington works but how to make it stop. -- P.J. O'Rourke
Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys. -- P.J. O'Rourke
When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators. -- P.J. O'Rourke
Politics is supposed to be the second oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. -- Ronald Reagan
The government is like a baby's alimentary canal, with a happy appetite at one end and no responsibility at the other. -- Ronald Reagan
I had a copy of the Soviet Constitution and I read it with great interest. And I saw all kinds of terms in there that sound just exactly like our own: 'Freedom of assembly' and 'freedom of speech' and so forth. Of course, they don't allow them to have those things, but they're in there in the constitution. But I began to wonder about the other constitutions -- everyone has one -- and our own, and why so much emphasis on ours. And then I found out, and the answer was very simple -- that's why you don't notice it at first. But it is so great that it tells the entire difference. All those other constitutions are documents that say, 'We, the government, allow the people the following rights,' and our Constitution says 'We the People, allow the government the following privileges and rights.' We give our permission to government to do the things that it does. And that's the whole story of the difference -- why we're unique in the world and why no matter what our troubles may be, we're going to overcome. -- Ronald Reagan
In general, the art of government consists in taking as much money as possible from one party of the citizens to give to the other. -- Voltaire, 1764
Liberty has never come from government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of government. The history of liberty is the history of resistance. -- Woodrow Wilson
Good intentions will always be pleaded for every assumption of authority. It is hardly too strong to say that the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions. There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters. -- Daniel Webster
I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; not enlightened enough to exercise their control with wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion. Enlighten the people generally and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day. -- Thomas Jefferson
A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine. -- Thomas Jefferson
The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not. -- Thomas Jefferson
Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms [of government] those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny. -- Thomas Jefferson, Bill for the More General diffusion of Knowledge (1778).
When all government, in little as in great things, shall be drawn to Washington as the Center of all power, it will render powerless the checks provided of one government on another and will become as venal and oppressive as the government from which we separated. -- Thomas Jefferson, 1821
When a man assumes a public trust, he should consider himself as public property. -- Thomas Jefferson
Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have .... The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases. -- Thomas Jefferson
Democracy extends the sphere of individual freedom; socialism restricts it. Democracy attaches all possible value to each man; socialism makes each man a mere agent, a mere number. Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude. -- Alexis de Tocqueville, Discours pronounce a l'assemblee constituante le 12 septembre 1848 sur la question du droit at travail
We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert. -- J. Robert Oppenheimer
When you have an efficient government, you have a dictatorship. -- Harry Truman
No man's life, liberty, or property is safe while the legislature is in session. -- Mark Twain (1866)
What this country needs is more unemployed politicians. -- Edward Langley
The makers of the Constitution conferred, as against the government, the Right to be let alone; the most comprehensive of rights, and the right most valued by civilized men. -- Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis: Olmstead v. United States (1928)
It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong. -- Thomas Sowell
Every movement that seeks to enslave a country, every dictatorship or potential dictatorship, needs some minority group as a scapegoat which it can blame for the nation’s troubles and use as a justification of its own demands for dictatorial powers. In Soviet Russia, the scapegoat was the bourgeoisie; in Nazi Germany, it was the Jewish people; in America, it is the businessmen. -- Ayn Rand
Socialism is the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance and the gospel of envy. -- Winston Churchill, 1948
One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors. -- Plato
I heartily accept the motto, - "That government is best which governs least;" Henry David Thoreau
Every increase in the size of government necessitates a decrease in an individual's freedom. -- Christian Harold Fletcher Riley
The state is the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it lies, too; and this lie creeps from its mouth; 'I, the state, am the people.' -- Friedrich Nietzsche