Government Quotes

Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there

Will Rogers

When government accepts responsibility for people, then people no longer take responsibility for themselves

George Pataki

The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg

Thomas Jefferson

The government is good at one thing...it knows how to break your legs, and then hand you a crutch and say 'see if it weren't for the government you wouldn't be able to walk

Harry Browne

Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks -- no form of government can render us secure. To suppose liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea. If there be sufficient virtue and intelligence in the community, it will be exercised in the selection of these men. So that we do not depend on their virtue, or put confidence in our rulers, but in the people who are to choose them.

James Madison

There are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations

James Madison

An honest man can feel no pleasure in the exercise of power over his fellow citizens . . . There has never been a moment of my life in which I should have relinquished for it the enjoyments of my family, my farm, my friends and books.

Thomas Jefferson

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

Abraham Lincoln

You have rights antecedent to all earthly governments; rights that cannot be repealed or restrained by human laws; right derived from the Great Legislator of the Universe

John Adams

I consider the foundation of the Constitution as laid on this ground that 'all powers not delegated to the United States, by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states or to the people.' To take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specially drawn around the powers of Congress, is to take possession of a boundless field of power not longer susceptible of any definition

Thomas Jefferson

A wise and frugal government ... shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government

Thomas Jefferson

The government of the United States is a definite government, confined to specified objects. It is not like state governments, whose powers are more general. Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government

James Madison

This country has come to feel the same when Congress is in session as when the baby gets hold of a hammer

Will Rogers

A civil servant is sometimes like a broken cannon - it won't work and you can't fire it.

George S. Patton

The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment

Robert M. Hutchins
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