Government Quotes :: Finest Quotes

It's every American's duty to support his government, but not necessarily in the style to which it has become accustomed.

Thomas Clifford

Democracy is like a raft: It won't sink, but you will always have your feet wet

Russell B. Long

The happiest thing that can be said about democracy... is that it is one of the few systems that has been willing to risk a long period of confusion and mixed purposes for the sake of giving man a chance to grow up in mind and responsibility

H.A. Overstreet

Democracy cannot flourish half rich and half poor, any more than it can flourish half free and half slave

Felix G. Rohatyn

You know why there are so many whitefish in the Yellowstone River? Because the Fish and Game people have never done anything to help them

Russell Chatham

Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary

Reinhold Niebuhr

To hear some men talk of the government, you would suppose that Congress was the law of gravitation, and kept the planets in their places.

Wendell Phillips

Democracy is an experiment, and the right of the majority to rule is no more inherent than the right of the minority to rule; and unless the majority represents sane, righteous, unselfish public sentiment, it has no inherent right

William Allen White

Many people say that government is necessary because some men cannot be trusted to look after themselves, but anarchists say that government is harmful because no men can be trusted to look after anyone else

Nicolas Walter

If human beings are fundamentally good, no government is necessary; if they are fundamentally bad, any government, being composed of human beings, would be bad also

Fred Woodworth

The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern

Lord Acton

Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists

John Kenneth Galbraith

Applause, mingled with boos and hisses, is about all that the average voter is able or willing to contribute to public life

Elmer Davis

Because of our Congressional committee system, our government is closer to a gerontocracy than a democracy.

Charles Frankel

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

Aesop

By definition, a government has no conscience. Sometimes it has a policy, but nothing more

Albert Camus

The really valuable thing in the pageant of human life seems to me not the State but the creative, sentient individual, the personality; it alone creates the noble and the sublime

Albert Einstein

A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves

Edward R. Murrow

It may well be that our means are fairly limited and our possibilities restricted when it comes to applying pressure on our government. But is this a reason to do nothing? Despair is nor an answer. Neither is resignation. Resignation only leads to indifference, which is not merely a sin but a punishment

Elie Wiesel

The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is inefficiency. An efficient bureaucracy is the greatest threat to liberty

Eugene McCarthy

The only sure bulwark of continuing liberty is a government strong enough to protect the interests of the people, and a people strong enough and well enough informed to maintain its sovereign control over the government.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt

I believe that liberty is the only genuinely valuable thing that men have invented, at least in the field of government, in a thousand years. I believe that it is better to be free than to be not free, even when the former is dangerous and the latter safe. I believe that the finest qualities of man can flourish only in free air ñ that progress made under the shadow of the policeman's club is false progress, and of no permanent value. I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave.

H. L. Mencken

As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their hearts desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron

H. L. Mencken

It was once said that the moral test of Government is how that Government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped

Hubert H. Humphrey

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

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