What government is the best? That which teaches us to govern ourselves
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have
Gerald R. Ford
The less government we have the better
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I think that people want peace so much that one of these days government had better get out of their way and let them have it
Dwight David Eisenhower
As long as Nazi violence was unleashed only, or mainly, against the Jews, the rest of the world looked on passively and even treaties and agreements were made with the patently criminal government of the Third Reich.... The doors of Palestine were closed to Jewish immigrants, and no country could be found that would admit those forsaken people. They were left to perish like their brothers and sisters in the occupied countries. We shall never forget the heroic efforts of the small countries, of the Scandinavian, the Dutch, the Swiss nations, and of individuals in the occupied part of Europe who did all in their power to protect Jewish lives
Albert Einstein
Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. Men have right that these wants should be provided for, [including] the want of a sufficient restraint upon their passions
Edmund Burke
Liberty has never come from the government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of it. The history of liberty is a history of resistance. The history of liberty is a history of limitations of governmental power, not the increase of it
Nadia Boulanger
I think we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious
Sir Francis Bacon
Democracy means government by discussion, but it is only effective if you can stop people talking
Clement Attlee
If liberty and equality, as is thought by some, are chiefly to be found in democracy, they will be best attained when all persons alike share in government to the utmost
Aristotle
Different men seek after happiness in different ways and by different means, and so make for themselves different modes of life and forms of government
Aristotle
Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other
John Quincy Adams
A wise and frugal government, which shall leave men free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor and bread it has earned -- this is the sum of good government
Thomas Jefferson
Experience teaches us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purpose is beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.
Louis Dembitz Brandeis