Quotes on Government

The majority represent a mass of cowards, willing to accept him who mirror its own soul and mind poverty.

What experience and history teach is this - that nations and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on any lessons they might have drawn from it. Variant: What experience and history teach is this - that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.

Government has been a fossil: it should be a plant.

All men would be masters of others, and no man is lord of himself.

Governments are not built to perceive large truths. Only people can perceive great truths. Governments specialize in small and intermediate truths. They have to be instructed by their people in great truths.

They should rule who are able to rule best.

The Government's power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the Government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people. Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government.

Democracy is the most demanding of all forms of government in terms of the energy, imagination, and public spirit required of the individual.

Good government is no substitute for self-government.

The fight against HIV/AIDS requires leadership from all parts of government - and it needs to go right to the top. AIDS is far more than a health crisis. It is a threat to development itself.

I'm still working for the government.

Why were so many Americans treated by their government as though their lives were as disposable as facial tissues? Because that was the way authors customarily treated bit-part players in their made-up tales.

If virtuous, the government need not fear the fair operation of attack and defense. Nature has given to man no other means of sifting the truth, either in religion, law, or politics.

Ignorance and bigotry, like other insanities, are incapable of self-government.

We are now vibrating between too much and too little government, and the pendulum will rest finally in the middle.

To constrain the brute force of the people, the European governments deem it necessary to keep them down by hard labor, poverty and ignorance, and to take from them, as from bees, so much of their earnings, as that unremitting labor shall be necessary to obtain a sufficient surplus to sustain a scanty and miserable life.

Government as well as religion has furnished its schisms, its persecutions and its devices for fattening idleness on the earnings of the people.

It is a problem, not clear in my mind, that [a society without government, as among our Indians] is not the best. But I believe it to be inconsistent with any great degree of population.

The excellence of every government is its adaptation to the state of those to be governed by it.

The only orthodox object of the institution of government is to secure the greatest degree of happiness possible to the general mass of those associated under it.

It will be said that great societies cannot exist without government.