c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn't even any rioting in the streets. People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There wasn't even an enemy you could put your finger on.
— Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
When one gets in bed with government, one must expect the diseases it spreads.
— Ron Paul
Writing laws is easy, but governing is difficult.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
The kind of man who wants the government to adopt and enforce his ideas is always the kind of man whose ideas are idiotic.
— H.L. Mencken, Minority Report
To the people who are upset about their hard-earned tax money going to things they don’t like: welcome to the f*cking club. Reimburse me for the Iraq war and oil subsidies, and diaphragms are on me!
— Jon Stewart
In a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.
— Matt Taibbi, Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America
I find out of long experience that I admire all nations and hate all governments
— John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America
Government does not solve problems. It subsidizes them.
— Ronald Reagan
The prestige of government has undoubtedly been lowered considerably by the Prohibition law. For nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced
— Albert Einstein
If once the people become inattentive to the public affairs, you and I, and Congress and Assemblies, Judges and Governors, shall all become wolves. It seems to be the law of our general nature, in spite of individual exceptions.
— Thomas Jefferson
The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield, and government to gain ground.
— Thomas Jefferson, Letters of Thomas Jefferson
Government! Three fourths parasitic and the other fourth Stupid fumbling.
— Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land
I have come to the conclusion that one useless man is a disgrace, that two become a lawfirm, and that three or more become a congress. -John Adams
— Sherman Edwards, 1776
You cannot lift the wage earner up by pulling the wage payer down.
— Abraham Lincoln
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.
— Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations
I hope that we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.
— Thomas Jefferson, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson: Retirement Series, Volume 10: 1 May 1816 to 18 January 1817
Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught.
— Honoré de Balzac
Anarchists did not try to carry out genocide against the Armenians in Turkey; they did not deliberately starve millions of Ukrainians; they did not create a system of death camps to kill Jews, gypsies, and Slavs in Europe; they did not fire-bomb scores of large German and Japanese cities and drop nuclear bombs on two of them; they did not carry out a ‘Great Leap Forward’ that killed scores of millions of Chinese; they did not attempt to kill everybody with any appreciable education in Cambodia; they did not launch one aggressive war after another; they did not implement trade sanctions that killed perhaps 500,000 Iraqi children.In debates between anarchists and statists, the burden of proof clearly should rest on those who place their trust in the state. Anarchy’s mayhem is wholly conjectural; the state’s mayhem is undeniably, factually horrendous.
— Robert Higgs
I heartily accept the motto, "That government is best which governs least"; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe — "That government is best which governs not at all"; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have. Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient.
— Henry David Thoreau
To compel a man to furnish funds for the propagation of ideas he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.
— Thomas Jefferson
Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
— H.L. Mencken
I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed, without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today – my own government.
— Martin Luther King Jr.
Our safety, our liberty, depends upon preserving the Constitution of the United States as our fathers made it inviolate. The people of the United States are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution, but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution.
— Abraham Lincoln
No nation has ever taxed itself into prosperity.
— Rush Limbaugh
Surely by now there can be few here who still believe the purpose of government is to protect us from the destructive activities of corporations. At last most of us must understand that the opposite is true: that the primary purpose of government is to protect those who run the economy from the outrage of injured citizens.
— Derrick Jensen, Endgame, Vol. 1: The Problem of Civilization
Democracy is worth dying for, because it's the most deeply honorable form of government ever devised by man.
— Ronald Reagan
There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution
— Aldous Huxley
I froze, shocked. (And don't try to claim that you did anything different the first time a government bureaucrat pulled a gun on you.)
— Brandon Sanderson, Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians
Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose -- and you allow him to make war at pleasure. . . . If, today, he should choose to say he thinks it necessary to invade Canada to prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him? You may say to him, 'I see no probability of the British invading us'; but he will say to you, 'Be silent; I see it, if you don't.
— Abraham Lincoln
The law is an opinion with a gun.
— Stefan Molyneux
It didn't come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God.
— Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.
— Tacitus, The Annals of Imperial Rome
It is much more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones.
— Calvin Coolidge
Good governance never depends upon laws, but upon the personal qualities of those who govern. The machinery of government is always subordinate to the will of those who administer that machinery. The most important element of government, therefore, is the method of choosing leaders.
— Frank Herbert, Children of Dune
There has always been, and there is now, a profound conflict of interest between the people and the government of the United States.
— Howard Zinn
We're a government that believes in everybody having the illusion of free will.
— Anthony Burgess, The Wanting Seed
Commerce with all nations, alliance with none, should be our motto.
— Thomas Jefferson
The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it. And even if he is not romantic personally he is very apt to spread discontent among those who are.
— H.L. Mencken, A Mencken Chrestomathy
The distrust of wit is the beginning of tyranny.
— Edward Abbey
It is substantially true, that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government. The rule, indeed, extends with more or less force to every species of free government.
— George Washington
Democracy is not merely a form of Government. It is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience. It is essentially an attitude of respect and reverence towards our fellow men.
— B.R. Ambedkar, Writings And Speeches: A Ready Reference Manual
In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem, government IS the problem. It isn't so much that liberals are ignorant, it's just that they know so much that isn't so.
— Ronald Reagan
The idea that the State is capable of solving social problems is now viewed with great scepticism – which foretells a coming change. As soon as scepticism is applied to the State, the State falls, since it fails at everything except increasing its power, and so can only survive on propaganda, which relies on unquestioning faith.
— Stefan Molyneux
One of the strongest natural proofs of the folly of hereditary right in kings, is, that nature disapproves it, otherwise, she would not so frequently turn it into ridicule by giving mankind an ass for a lion.
— Thomas Paine, Common Sense
You and I are told we must choose between a left or right, but I suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down. Up to man's age-old dream -- the maximum of individual freedom consistent with order --or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism. Regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would sacrifice freedom for security have embarked on this downward path.
— Ronald Reagan
That is the problem with governments these days. They want to do things all the time
—  they are always very busy thinking of what things they can do next. That is not what people want. People want to be left alone to look after their cattle.
Our country is too large to have all its affairs directed by a single government. Public servants at such a distance, and from under the eye of their constituents, must, from the circumstance of distance, be unable to administer and overlook all the details necessary for the good government of the citizens; and the same circumstance, by rendering detection impossible to their constituents, will invite public agents to corruption, plunder and waste.
— Thomas Jefferson
Whenever governments adopt a moral tone - as opposed to an ethical one - you know something is wrong.
— John Ralston Saul, The Unconscious Civilization
The government is us; WE are the government, you and I."- Theodore Roosevelt
— Theodore Roosevelt
Lord, the money we do spend on Government and it's not one bit better than the government we got for one-third the money twenty years ago.
— Will Rogers
Weak emperors mean strong viceroys. 
— Isaac Asimov, Foundation
Nothing lasts longer than a temporary government program.
— Ronald Reagan
The whole purpose of propaganda is to make the obvious seem obscure, or offensive
— Stefan Molyneux
I believe that in time we will have reached the point where we will deserve to be free of government.
— Jorge Luis Borges, Brodie's Report
The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation and foreign commerce. ... The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects which in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives and liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement and prosperity of the State.
— James Madison
It still would be years before I understood the seriousness of my change of view. Much later, I recognized it in "Revolution," the essay of Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski, who describes the moment when a man on the edge of a crowd looks back defiantly at a policeman — and when that policeman senses a sudden refusal to accept his defining gaze — as the imperceptible moment in which rebellion is born. "All books about all revolutions begin with a chapter that describes the decay of tottering authority or the misery and sufferings of the people," Kapuscinski writes. "They should begin with a psychological chapter — one that shows how a harassed, terrified man suddenly breaks his terror, stops being afraid. This unusual process — sometimes accomplished in an instant, like a shock — demands to be illustrated. Man gets rid of fear and feel free. Without that, there would be no revolution.
— Gloria Steinem, Revolution from Within
They criticize me for harping on the obvious; if all the folks in the United States would do the few simple things they know they ought to do, most of our big problems would take care of themselves.
— Calvin Coolidge
What, then, is the government? An intermediary body established between the subjects and the sovereign for their mutual communication, a body charged with the execution of the laws and the maintenance of freedom, both civil and political.
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract
By this means the government may secretly and unobserved, confiscate the wealth of the people, and not one man in a million will detect the theft.
— John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace
I believe the term is ‘eminent domain.’Ah, yes. That means ‘theft by the government,
— Terry Pratchett, Thud!
The U.S. is a cosmetic democracy.
— John Pilger
A mere enumeration of government activity is evidence -- often the sole evidence offered -- of "inadequate" nongovernment institutions, whose "inability" to cope with problems "obviously" required state intervention. Government is depicted as acting not in response to its own political incentives and constraints but because it is compelled to do so by concern for the public interest: it "cannot keep its hands off" when so "much is at stake," when emergency "compels" it to supersede other decision making processes. Such a tableau simple ignores the possibility that there are political incentives for the production and distribution of "emergencies" to justify expansions of power as well as to use episodic emergencies as a reason for creating enduring government institutions.
— Thomas Sowell, Knowledge And Decisions
[T]here are some human rights that are so deep that we can't negotiate them away. I mean people do heinous, terrible things. But there are basic human rights I believe that every human being has. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the United Nations says it for me. And it says there are two basic rights that can't be negotiated that government doesn't give for good behavior and doesn't take away for bad behavior. And it's the right not to be tortured and not to be killed. Because the flip side of this is that then when you say OK we're gonna turn over -- they truly have done heinous things, so now we will turn over to the government now the right to take their life. It involves other people in doing essentially the same kind of
— Helen Prejean
My definition of democracy is - A form and a method of Government whereby revolutionary changes in the social life are brought about without bloodshed. That is the real test. It is perhaps the severest test. But when you are judging the quality of the material you must put it to the severest test.
— B.R. Ambedkar, Writings And Speeches: A Ready Reference Manual
Society will develop a new kind of servitude which covers the surface of society with a network of complicated rules, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate. It does not tyrannise but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.
— Alexis de Tocqueville
Anarchy is a state of society where the only government is reason.
— Michael Schwab
Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of paradise.
— Thomas Paine, Common Sense
This country would not be a land of opportunity, America could not be America, if the people were shackled with government monopolies.
— Calvin Coolidge
The petty thief is imprisoned but the big thief becomes a feudal lord.
— Zhuangzi, The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu
Now listen to the first three aims of the corporatist movement in Germany, Italy and France during the 1920s. These were developed by the people who went on to become part of the Fascist experience:(1) shift power directly to economic and social interest groups;(2) push entrepreneurial initiative in areas normally reserved for public bodies;(3) obliterate the boundaries between public and private interest -- that is, challenge the idea of the public interest.This sounds like the official program of most contemporary Western governments.
— John Ralston Saul, The Unconscious Civilization
In philosophy seminars, the choice is usually between good and evil. In the real world, however, the choice is often between a bad guy and a worse guy.
— Dinesh D'Souza, Letters to a Young Conservative
In my considered opinion, salary is payment for goods delivered and it must conform to the law of supply and demand. If, therefore, the fixed salary is a violation of this law - as, for instance, when I see two engineers leaving college together and both equally well trained and efficient, and one getting forty thousand while the other only earns two thousand , or when lawyers and hussars, possessing no special qualifications, are appointed directors of banks with huge salaries - I can only conclude that their salaries are not fixed according to the law of supply and demand but simply by personal influence. And this is an abuse important in itself and having a deleterious effect on government service.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement.
— John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
Government should be a place where people can come together, and no one gets left behind. No one…gets left behind. An instrument of good.
— Aaron Sorkin
The health care bill is nothing about health care- it's about controlling the people.
— David Lincoln
Let the people think they govern and they will be governed
— William Penn, Some Fruits of Solitude
Drugs is a government game, Bilal. A way to rob us of our best black men, our army. Everyone who plays the game loses. Then they get you right back where we started, in slavery! Then they get to say "This time you did it to yourself." I won't play that game.
— Sister Souljah, The Coldest Winter Ever
If the people who make the decisions are the people who will also bear the consequences of those decisions, perhaps better decisions will result.
— John Abrams
In any case, frequent punishments are a sign of weakness or slackness in the government. There is no man so bad that he cannot be made good for something. No man should be put to death, even as an example, if he can be left to live without danger to society.
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract
It is reasonable that everyone who asks justice should do justice
— Thomas Jefferson
Representative government is artifice, a political myth, designed to conceal from the masses the dominance of a self-selected, self-perpetuating, and self-serving traditional ruling class.
— Giuseppe Prezzolini
I have nothing but contempt for the kind of governor who is afraid, for whatever reason, to follow the course that he knows is best for the State.
— Sophocles, Antigone
That's the problem with this whole country. Fucking vast prosperity. No one has any real problems anymore. Ninety percent of the damn politicians in this town either think there's no war on terror, or if we'd just be nice to these zealots they'll leave us alone. Well, that ain't going to fucking happen. The Huns are circling, and we're sitting around arguing about gay rights and prayer and guns and global warming and all kinds of bullshit. These idiots will eventually wake up to the threat, but by then it might be too late. (Stan Hurley)
— Vince Flynn, Extreme Measures
Governments are deemed to succeed or fail by how well they make money go round, regardless of whether it serves any useful purpose. They regard it as a sacred duty to encourage the country’s most revolting spectacle: the annual feeding frenzy in which shoppers queue all night, then stampede into the shops, elbow, trample and sometimes fight to be the first to carry off some designer junk which will go into landfill before the sales next year. The madder the orgy, the greater the triumph of economic management.
— George Monbiot
The IRS! They're like the Mafia, they can take anything they want!
— Jerry Seinfeld
The degree of liberty or tyranny in any government is in large degree a reflection of the relative determination of the subjects to be free and their willingness and ability to resist efforts to enslave them.
— Gene Sharp, From Dictatorship to Democracy
To [the government] it didn't matter what happened to the American people as long as america in the abstract was kept strong.
— Isaac Asimov, The Secret of the Universe
Vimes had once discussed the Ephebian idea of ‘democracy’ with Carrot, and had been rather interested in the idea that everyone had a vote until he found out that while he, Vimes, would have a vote, there was no way in the rules that anyone could prevent Nobby Nobbs from having one as well. Vimes could see the flaw there straight away.
— Terry Pratchett, The Fifth Elephant
I can retain neither respect nor affection for government which has been moving from wrong to wrong in order to defend its immorality
— Mahatma Gandhi
The great rule of conduct for us, in regard to foreign nations, is, in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible.
— George Washington
It's to the Capitol's advantage to have us divided among ourselves.Another tool to cause misery in our district. A way to plant hatred between the starving workers [of the Seam] and those who can generally count on supper and thereby ensure we will never trust one another.
— Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games
Being less discriminative shouldn't mean protecting nasty people, then discriminating against the innocent
— James Perrin, The Occasional Swearing Of Politician Perrin
The best government is a benevolent tyranny tempered by an occasional assassination.
— Voltaire
When a plutocracy is disguised as a democracy, the system is beyond corrupt.
— Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
Now, paper and pencils," said Miss Marcy, clapping her hands.Writing paper is scarce in this house, and I had no intention of tearing sheets out of this exercise book, which is a superb sixpenny one the Vicar gave me. In the end, Miss Marcy took the middle pages out of her library record, which gave us a pleasant feeling that we were stealing from the government, and then we sat round the table and elected her chairman.
— Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle
Unless government appropriately regulates oil developments and holds oil executives accountable, the public will not trust them to drill, baby, drill. And we must!
— Sarah Palin
Let us leave political questions to be decided by the powers concerned," Sir Ralph would say, "as we have adopted a form of government which forbids us to discuss our interests ourselves. If a nation is responsible for the faults of its legislature, what one can you find that is guiltier than yours?
— George Sand, Indiana
Without debate, without criticism no administration and no country can succeed and no republic can survive.
— John F. Kennedy
Humanity lived many years and ruled the earth, sometimes wisely, sometimes well, but mostly neither.
— Catherynne M. Valente, Silently and Very Fast
If you start to smell some of the shit, you start smelling all of the shit
— Doug Stanhope
The government cannot give to anybody anything that thegovernment does not first take from somebody else.
— Adrian Rogers
Obviously these are some exceptional young people, but what they have in common is that they were ordinary people who cared. They wanted to act, to do something, to make life better for other people—and they have.
— Morgan Carroll, Take Back Your Government: A Citizen's Guide to Making Your Government Work For You
The people's government, made for the people, made by the people and answerable to the people.January 1830
— Daniel Webster, Webster and Hayne's speeches in the United States Senate, on Mr. Foot's resolution of January 1830; also, Daniel Webster's speech in the United States Senate, March 7, 1850, on the slavery compromise.
What all these lofty and vague phrases boil down to is that the court can impose things that the voters don't want and the Constitution does not require, but which are in vogue in circles to which the court responds.
— Thomas Sowell, Knowledge And Decisions
No government ought to be without censors
—  and where the press is free no one ever will.
It is eminently possible to have a market-based economy that requires no such brutality and demands no such ideological purity. A free market in consumer products can coexist with free public health care, with public schools, with a large segment of the economy -- like a national oil company -- held in state hands. It's equally possible to require corporations to pay decent wages, to respect the right of workers to form unions, and for governments to tax and redistribute wealth so that the sharp inequalities that mark the corporatist state are reduced. Markets need not be fundamentalist.
— Naomi Klein
To me, patriotism means dedication to the principles on which the country was founded and a willingness to stand firm and fight for these principles regardless of what the government says or does
— Richard J. Maybury, World WarI: The Rest of the Story & How It Affects You Today
To do what you imply would require nothing short of divine intervention. you must change man, not systems. Can you and our vapouring friends of the Literary Chamber of Rennes, or any other learned society of France, devise a system of government that has never yet been tried? Surely not. And can we say of any system tried that it proved other than failure in the end? My dear Philippe, the future is to be read with certainty only in the past. Ad actu ad posse valet consecutio. Man never changes. He is always greedy, always acquisitive, always vile. I am speaking of Man in the bulk.
— Rafael Sabatini, Scaramouche
We still find the greedy hand of government thrusting itself into every corner and crevice of industry and grasping at the spoil of the multitude. Invention is continually exercised to furnish new pretenses for revenue and taxation. It watches prosperity as its prey and permits none to escape without a tribute.
— Thomas Paine
Government is all show when it isn't murder in the dark ... or soldiers in the open.
— Orson Scott Card, Pathfinder
Hence, likewise, they will avoid the necessity of those overgrown military establishments, which, under any form of government, are inauspicious to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to Republican Liberty. In this sense it is, that your Union ought to be considered as a main prop of your liberty, and that the love of the one ought to endear to you the preservation of the other.
— George Washington, George Washington's Farewell Address
Government can easily exist without laws, but law cannot exist without government.
— Bertrand Russell
Did you really think we want those laws observed?" said Dr. Ferris. "We want them to be broken. You'd better get it straight that it's not a bunch of boy scouts you're up against... We're after power and we mean it... There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced or objectively interpreted – and you create a nation of law-breakers – and then you cash in on guilt. Now that's the system, Mr. Reardon, that's the game, and once you understand it, you'll be much easier to deal with.
— Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
Support for the arts -- merde! A government-supported artist is an incompetent whore!
— Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land
I have an idea about voting, how about on every ballot we include "None of the above". People may laugh at that, but what that is, it is a vote of no confidence in your government and I'm willing to bet that in some elections, 'None of the Above' would win. Imagine if you won the election but lost to 'None of the Above'. Wouldn't that make you re-think your positions?
— Jesse Ventura
That government is best which governs least.
— Thomas Paine
The new America, instead, is fast becoming a vast ghetto in which all of us, conservatives and progressives, are being bled dry by a relatively tiny oligarchy of extremely clever financial criminals and their castrato henchmen in government, whose job is to be good actors on TV and put on a good show.
— Matt Taibbi, Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America
Every time government attempts to handle our affairs, it costs more and the results are worse than if we had handled them ourselves.
— Benjamin Constant
The source of our suffering has been our timidity. We have been afraid to think....Let us dare to read, think, speak, write.
— David McCullough, John Adams
The mistake our politicians so often make with these industry leaders is in thinking they are interested in, or respectful of, the power of government. All they want is to keep stealing. If you can offer them the government’s seal of approval on that, they’ll take it. But if you can’t, well, they’ll take that too.
— Matt Taibbi, Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America
Anarchy is like custard cooking over a flame; it has to be constantly stirred or it sticks and gets heavy, like government.
— Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
Our lives are led, and our decisions made, within a network of needs and wants, some natural, some arising from the acts of others, some aggravated by the acts of the state. We are all bored, or threatened, or tantalized in differing degrees by a perilous world, some hostile people, and a not very sensitive government.
— Carl Cohen
We're supposed to strive for harmony, and that's what the art of tea is supposed to accomplish... but harmony is very, very difficult to achieve in this country. Tea ceremony is powerless. But it's also not such a bad thing either. You should enjoy it while you can.
— Koushun Takami, Battle Royale
Let us never weary of repeating, that to think first of the disinherited and sorrowful classes; to relieve, ventilate, enlighten, and love them; to enlarge their horizon to a magnificent extent; to lavish upon them education in every shape; to set them an example of labor, and never of indolence; to lessen the weight of the individual burden by increasing the notion of the universal aim; to limit poverty without limiting wealth; to create vast fields of public and popular activity; to have, like Briareus, a hundred hands to stretch out on all sides to the crushed and the weak; to employ the collective power in the grand task of opening workshops for every arm, schools for every aptitude, and laboratories for every intellect; to increase wages, diminish toil, and balance the debit and credit--that is to say, proportion enjoyment to effort, and supply to demand; in a word, to evolve from the social machine, on behalf of those who suffer and those who are ignorant, more light and more comfort, is (and sympathetic souls must not forget it) the first of brotherly obligations, and (let egotistic hearts learn the fact) the first of political necessities.
— Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
Government is the right disposition of things.
— Michel Foucault, The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality
Crawling out of the flophouseI saw the mayor stealing my junkI doth protest, citizen's arrestNow my body's in his trunkWhere's the shadow government when you need it?Where's the shadow government?It's a bad, bad world!
— They Might Be Giants
Have you ever stopped to ponder the amount of blood spilt, the volume of tears shed, the degree of pain and anguish endured, the number of noble men and women lost in battle so that we as individuals might have a say in governing our country?  Honor the lives sacrificed for your freedoms. Vote.
— Richelle E. Goodrich, Smile Anyway
Strange that men, from age to age, should consent to hold their lives at the breath of another, merely that each in his turn may have a power of acting the tyrant according to the law! Oh, God! give me poverty! Shower upon me all the imaginary hardships of human life! I will receive them with all thankfulness. Turn me a prey to the wild beasts of the desert, so I be never again the victim of man, dressed in the gore-dripping robes of authority! Suffer me at least to call life, the pursuits of life, my own! Let me hold it at the mercy of the elements, of the hunger of the beasts, or the revenge of barbarians, but not of the cold-blooded prudence of monopolists and kings!
— William Godwin, Caleb Williams
People have a hard time accepting free-market economics for the same reason they have a hard time accepting evolution: it is counterintuitive. Life looks intelligently designed, so our natural inclination is to infer that there must be an intelligent designer--a God. Similarly, the economy looks designed, so our natural inclination is to infer that we need a designer--a government. In fact, emergence and complexity theory explains how the principles of self-organization and emergence cause complex systems to arise from simple systems without a top-down designer.
— Michael Shermer
The social organs are constituted so as to enable them to develop harmoniously in the grand air of liberty. Away, then, with quacks and organizers! Away with their rings, and their chains, and their hooks, and their pincers! Away with their artificial methods! Away with their social laboratories, their governmental whims, their centralization, their tariffs, their universities, their State religions, their inflationary or monopolizing banks, their limitations, their restrictions, their moralizations, and their equalization by taxation! And now, after having vainly inflicted upon the social body so many systems, let them end where they ought to have begun — reject all systems, and try of liberty — liberty, which is an act of faith in God and in His work
— Frédéric Bastiat
The President and the Congress are all very well in their way. They can say what they think they think, but it rests with the Supreme Court to decide what they have really thought.
— Theodore Roosevelt
One class. No masters. No slaves. No black. No white. No Jew. No Christian. One race-- The human race.
— Edith Hahn Beer
It is not the function of our Government to keep the citizen from falling into error
—  it is the function of the citizen to keep the Government from falling into error.
(Patrick) Henry rightly understood that the moral condition of the American people was a direct product of their religious faith, and that politics and morality were inevitably intertwined. Thus, the political structure ultimately rested on a religious foundation. The "great pillars of all government and of social life, "Henry once observed, are virtue, morality, and religion.
— David J. Vaughan
The best government is that which governs least.
— John L. O'Sullivan, United States Magazine, Or, General Repository of Useful Instruction and Rational Amusement.
Folks can’t seem to realize that it isn’t a smooth talker we need in there but a steady man, a man with judgement. Any medicine-show man can spout words, if they are written for him. It takes no genius to sound well. To act right and at the right time is something else again.
— Louis L'Amour, Comstock Lode
Once you sell people fear, they'll buy just about anything.
— David Alejandro Fearnhead
Better to live under one tyrant a thousand miles away, than a thousand tyrants one mile away.
— Daniel Bliss
The state was made for man, not man for state.
— Albert Einstein
Perhaps the most important thing I learned was about democracy, that democracy is not our government, our constitution, our legal structure. Too often they are enemies of democracy.
— Howard Zinn, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times
In fact, if law were restricted to protecting all persons, all liberties, and all properties; if law were nothing more than the organized combination of the individual's right to self-defense; if law were the obstacle, the check, the punisher of all oppression and plunder — is it likely that we citizens would then argue much about the extent of the franchise?
— Frédéric Bastiat, The Law
Dictatorship, by whatever name, is founded on the doctrine that the individual amounts to nothing; that the State is the only one that counts; and that men and women and children were put on earth solely for the purpose of serving the state.
— Harry Truman
The duty of the people is to tend to their own affairs.The duty of government is to help them do it.This is the pasta of politics.The inspired leader, the true prince, no matter how great, can only be sauce upon the pasta.--Bombolini
— Robert Crichton, The Secret of Santa Vittoria
So, ignorant we are. But we're not stupid. Indeed...remaining ignorant about politics and our government is a perfectly rational response to the government we have. The question isn't what we know. The question is what we're capable of knowing, and doing, if we have the right incentives, and the right opportunity.
— Lawrence Lessig
But having biologists outside the Beltway remained a problem for the adminisration. "They found they couldn't control us," Williams said... "That sort of thing just drove them up the wall. They were so used to saying 'do this,' and we'll just go away and do it. Never ask questions. The biologists had good connections with the press and national environmental group. "So eventually they said, 'Okay we're going to send you guys out to the hinterlands.'" The Regan administration began to dismantle the Endangered Species Office in D.C. Biologists have been working from regional offices ever since.
— Joe Roman, Listed: Dispatches from America's Endangered Species Act
How is the schoolmaster, the nation, to know which boy needs the whipping?
— Woodrow Wilson, Congressional Government: A Study in American Politics
We never pray against our government or call down curses on them. Instead, we have learned that God is in control both of our own lives and the government we live under. God has used China's government for His own purposes, molding and shaping His children as He sees fit. Instead of focusing our prayers against any political system, we pray that regardless of what happens to us, we will be pleasing to God.
— Brother Yun, The Heavenly Man: The Remarkable True Story of Chinese Christian Brother Yun
I doubt that my sense of personal freedom is any stronger than anybody else's. I'm happy to respect authority when it's genuine authority, based on moral or intellectual or even technical superiority. I'm eager to follow a hero if we can find one. But I tend to resist or evade any kind of authority based merely on the power to coerce. Government, for example. The Army tried to train us to salute the uniform, not the man. Failed. I will salute the man, maybe, if I think he's worthy of it, but I don't salute uniforms anymore.
— Edward Abbey, Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
If government were a product, selling it would be illegal.
— P.J. O'Rourke, Parliament of Whores: A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U.S. Government
Government is nothing more than the combined force of society or the united power of the multitude for the peace, order, safety, good, and happiness of the people... There is no king or queen bee distinguished from all the others by size or figure or beauty and variety of colors in the human hive. No man has yet produced any revelation from heaven in his favor, any divine communication to govern his fellow men. Nature throws us all into the world equal and alike... The preservation of liberty depends upon the intellectual and moral character of the people. As long as knowledge and virtue are diffused generally among the body of a nation it is impossible they should be enslaved. Ambition is one of the more ungovernable passions of the human heart. The love of power is insatiable and uncontrollable... There is a danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living wth power to endanger public liberty.
— David McCullough, John Adams
I need to say this – you shouldn't trust any government, actually including this one. You should not trust government – full stop. The natural inclination of government is to hoard power and information; to accrue power to itself in the name of the public good.
— Nick Clegg
When our government is spoken of as some menacing, threatening foreign entity, it ignores the fact that, in our democracy, government is us.
— Barack Obama
[Obamacare] was almost the perfect example of politics in the Bubble Era, where the time horizon for anyone with real power is always close to zero, long-term thinking is an alien concept, and even the most massive and ambitious undertakings are motivated entirely by short-term rewards. A radical reshaping of the entire economy, for two election cycles’ worth of campaign cash – that was what this bill meant. It sounds absurdly reductive to say so, but there’s no other explanation that makes any sense.
— Matt Taibbi, Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America
Many, if not most, of the difficulties we experience in dealing with government agencies arise from the agencies being part of a fragmented and open political system…The central feature of the American constitutional system—the separation of powers—exacerbates many of these problems. The governments of the US were not designed to be efficient or powerful, but to be tolerable and malleable. Those who designed these arrangements always assumed that the federal government would exercise few and limited powers.
— James Q. Wilson
A breath of laughter will blow a Government out of existence in Paris much more effectually than a whiff of cannon-smoke
— Robert Barr, The Mystery of the Five Hundred Diamonds
When there’s a vacuum of public input, lobbyists usually fill it. But when there’s public input, the people usually win.
— Morgan Carroll, Take Back Your Government: A Citizen's Guide to Making Your Government Work For You
In 1891 the Brazilian Minister of Finance decreed the abolition of history
—  he ordered the destruction of every document which dealt in any way with slavery or the slave trade
It is a false and dangerous situation which bases public power on private want, and roots the grandeur of the State in the suffering of the individual. It is a badly constituted grandeur which combines all the material elements, and into which no moral element enters.
— Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
What if, I never tire of asking, we said 'Secret Council' instead of the archaic and therefore cuddly 'Privy Council'?
— Christopher Hitchens
I have inherited this burden of superstition and nonsense. I govern innumerable men but must acknowledge that I am governed by birds and thunderclaps
— Thornton Wilder, The Ides of March
To him, one of the most fascinating historical aspects of governments was their complete disregard for governing. Governments were single-minded and interested only in increasing their control and any governance that came out of the government's actions were purely coincidental. .... The lowest flunky as well as the most powerful bureaucrat was more interested in protecting his sinecure than in helping the citizens who coughed up tax money to pay the government worker's salaries.
— Hank Quense, Zaftan Entrepreneurs
All governments, even these precious “democracies,” derive all their power by force. Do something the government doesn’t want, like, say, cross the street against the light, refuse to submit to its authority, and it won’t be long before they’ll use some form of force, usually a weapon and the threat of death or injury, to compel you to comply.
— S. Evan Townsend, Hammer of Thor
Whom the gods would destroy, they first subsidize.
— George Charles Roche III
Despots prefer the friendship of the dog, who, unjustly mistreated and debased, still loves and serves the man who wronged him.
— Charles Fourier
The government of the United States is a device for maintaining in perpetuity the rights of the people, with the ultimate extinction of all privileged classes.
— Calvin Coolidge
We have no government and no laws, if by law is meant a stereotyped convention supported by force, and not to be altered without the aid of cumbersome machinery.
— Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men
Surely of all ‘rights of man’, this right of the ignorant man to be guided by the wiser, to be, gently or forcibly, held in the true course by him, is the indisputablest.
— Thomas Carlyle
A man can lead a reasonably full life without a family, a fixed local residence, or a religious affiliation, but if he is stateless he is nothing. He has no rights, no security, and little opportunity for a useful career. There is no salvation on earth outside the framework of an organized state.
— Joseph Reese Strayer, On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State
A tyrant has uncommon moral compass.
— Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
Uncertainty is one of government recipes.
— Toba Beta, Betelgeuse Incident: Insiden Bait Al-Jauza
Government can only reign over a classes-divided society.
— Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
The order should not have been given,' she said. 'It was not done for the city but for your private ends.'I shook my head. 'There is no difference.'You believe that?'A Prince must, or he is no Prince.
— John Christopher, The Sword of the Spirits
Everything that he was saying sounded incredible, but Frank knew enough about politics to know that governments got away with what they did because they counted on ordinary citizens dismissing events as being too incredible and implausible. 
— Thrity Umrigar, The Weight of Heaven
It's every American's duty to support his government but not necessarily in the style to which it has become accustomed.
— Thomas C. Mann
The good guys had to operate on a higher level than the killers--just for society to keep track of who was who.
— Keith Ablow, Murder Suicide
Susan Margaret Collins was born on December 7, 1952 in Caribou, Maine and is presently the senior United States Senator from Maine. Senator Collins has served in the Senate since 1997 and chaired the Senate Committee on Homeland Security from 2003 to 2007. She now is the Chairwoman of the Senate Special Committee on Aging. Collins is a graduate of St. Lawrence University, a liberal arts college, in Canton, New York. Considered a moderate Republican, she became the only Republican in the U.S. Senate currently representing a state in New England. Her vote was one of three republican votes in the Senate that helped to defeat a bill designed to destroy the Affordable Health Care Program presently in effect. John McCain's heroic stand only mattered because Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski bravely stood by him! It was their courage that saved health care for approximately 22 million people.
— Captain Hank Bracker, "Seawater One...."
Capitalism is a social system where the health and security of a nation are compromised for corporate gain.
— Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem