Government Quotations
Authors that have more than 2 quotes:
Sir Winston Churchill,
Henry Louis Mencken,
Will Rogers
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| It is bad to be oppressed by a minority, but it is worse to be oppressed by a majority. |
| - Lord Acton |
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| The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern. |
| - Lord Acton |
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| In the absence of justice, what is sovereignty but organized robbery? |
| - Saint Aurelius Augustine |
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| Democracy is a government where you can say what you think even if you don't think. |
| - Unknown Author |
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| If con is the opposite of pro, is Congress the opposite of progress? |
| - Unknown Author |
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| It might be more worthwhile if we stopped wringing our hands and started ringing our congressmen. |
| - Unknown Author |
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| The worst thing in this world, next to anarchy, is government. |
| - Henry Ward Beecher |
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| Democracy is an abuse of statistics. |
| - Jorge Luis Borges |
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| The difference between having a Labour government for business to having a Tory government has been fairly negligible. |
| - Richard Branson |
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| The People, though we think of a great entity when we use the word, means nothing more than so many millions of individual men. |
| - James Bryce |
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| Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those others that have been tried from time to time. |
| - Sir Winston Churchill |
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| So they [the Government] go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent. |
| - Sir Winston Churchill |
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| The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter. |
| - Sir Winston Churchill |
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| Democracy consists of choosing your dictators, after they've told you what you think it is you want to hear. |
| - Alan Coren |
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| Applause, mingled with boos and hisses, is about all that the average voter is able or willing to contribute to public life. |
| - Elmer Davis |
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| Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest. |
| - Denis Diderot |
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| A Conservative government is an organised hypocrisy. |
| - Benjamin Disraeli |
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| Democracy becomes a government of bullies tempered by editors. |
| - Ralph Waldo Emerson |
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| The government deficit is the difference between the amount of money the government spends and the amount it has the nerve to collect. |
| - Sam Ewing |
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| Bureaus are extrusions from the body politic - they are pus. |
| - Martin H. Fischer |
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| Morphine and state relief are the same. You go dopey, feel better and are worse off. |
| - Martin H. Fischer |
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| Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists. |
| - John Kenneth Galbraith |
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| You will find that the State is the kind of organization which, though it does big things badly, does small things badly, too. |
| - John Kenneth Galbraith |
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| It is hard to feel individually responsible with respect to the invisible processes of a huge and distant government. |
| - John W. Gardner |
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| How can one conceive of a one-party system in a country that has over two hundred varieties of cheese? |
| - Charles de Gaulle |
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| Treaties are like roses and young girls - they last while they last. |
| - Charles de Gaulle |
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| Here is my first principle of foreign policy: good government at home. |
| - William Ewart Gladstone |
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| To rule is easy, to govern difficult. |
| - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe |
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| It is organized violence on top which creates individual violence at the bottom. |
| - Emma Goldman |
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| A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away. |
| - Barry Goldwater |
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| Democracy is the only system that persists in asking the powers that be whether they are the powers that ought to be. |
| - Sydney J. Harris |
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| Talk is cheap - except when Congress does it. |
| - Cullen Hightower |
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| The mistakes made by Congress wouldn't be so bad if the next Congress didn't keep trying to correct them. |
| - Cullen Hightower |
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| Blessed are the young, for they shall inherit the national debt. |
| - Herbert Hoover |
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| 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 Maynard Hutchins |
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| Information is the currency of democracy. |
| - Thomas Jefferson |
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| It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself. |
| - Thomas Jefferson |
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| Christmas is the time when kids tell Santa what they want and adults pay for it. Deficits are when adults tell government what they want and their kids pay for it. |
| - Richard Lamm |
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| A survey says that American workers work the first three hours every day just to pay their taxes. So that's why we can't get anything done in the morning: We're government workers. |
| - Jay Leno |
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| No man is good enough to govern another man without that other's consent. |
| - Abraham Lincoln |
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| Democracy gives every man the right to be his own oppressor. |
| - James Russell Lowell |
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| If men were angels, no government would be necessary. |
| - James Madison |
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| The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them. |
| - Karl Marx |
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| The plague of government is senile delinquency. |
| - Mignon McLaughlin |
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| Young lovers and young nations face the same problem: after orgasm, what? |
| - Mignon McLaughlin |
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| Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage. |
| - Henry Louis Mencken |
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| Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under. |
| - Henry Louis Mencken |
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| I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time. |
| - Henry Louis Mencken |
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| The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office. |
| - Henry Louis Mencken |
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| In the infancy of societies, the chiefs of the state shape its institutions; later the institutions shape the chiefs of state. |
| - Baron de Montesquieu |
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| The way people in democracies think of the government as something different from themselves is a real handicap. And, of course, sometimes the government confirms their opinion. |
| - Lewis Mumford |
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| Sure there are dishonest men in local government. But there are dishonest men in national government too. |
| - Richard M. Nixon |
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| Every government is a parliament of whores. The trouble is, in a democracy, the whores are us. |
| - P.J. O'Rourke |
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| Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys. |
| - P.J. O'Rourke |
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| Washington is a place where politicians don't know which way is up and taxes don't know which way is down. |
| - Robert Orben |
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| 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 |
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| The instant formal government is abolished, society begins to act. A general association takes place, and common interest produces common security. |
| - Thomas Paine |
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| A civil servant is sometimes like a broken cannon - it won't work and you can't fire it. |
| - George S. Patton |
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| Let the people think they govern, and they will be governed. |
| - William Penn |
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| 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 |
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| Under capitalism man exploits man; under socialism the reverse is true. |
| - Polish Proverb |
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| It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subjected to the lights of publicity during those years. But, the world is now more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries. |
| - David Rockefeller |
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| There's no trick to being a humorist when you have the whole government working for you. |
| - Will Rogers |
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| Ancient Rome declined because it had a Senate, now what's going to happen to us with both a House and a Senate? |
| - Will Rogers |
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| I don't make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts. |
| - Will Rogers |
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| Ohio claims they are due a president as they haven't had one since Taft. Look at the United States, they have not had one since Lincoln. |
| - Will Rogers |
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| This country has come to feel the same when Congress is in session as when the baby gets hold of a hammer. |
| - Will Rogers |
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| Better the occasional faults of a government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference. |
| - Franklin D. Roosevelt |
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| There is no nonsense so errant that it cannot be made the creed of the vast majority by adequate governmental action. |
| - Bertrand Russell |
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| Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few. |
| - George Bernard Shaw |
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| If all the economists were laid end to end, they'd never reach a conclusion. |
| - George Bernard Shaw |
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| An open society is a society which allows its members the greatest possible degree of freedom in pursuing their interests compatible with the interests of others, Soros said. The Bush administration merely has a narrower definition of self-interest. It does not include the interests of others. |
| - George Soros |
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| Most of the poverty and misery in the world is due to bad government, lack of democracy, weak states, internal strife, and so on. |
| - George Soros |
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| It's not the voting that's democracy; it's the counting. |
| - Tom Stoppard |
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| For in reason, all government without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery. |
| - Jonathan Swift |
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| The character inherent in the American people has done all that has been accomplished; and it would have done somewhat more, if the government had not sometimes got in its way. |
| - Henry David Thoreau |
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| Whenever you have an efficient government you have a dictatorship. |
| - Harry S Truman |
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| It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress. |
| - Mark Twain |
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| It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong. |
| - Voltaire |
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| Many people consider the things which government does for them to be social progress, but they consider the things government does for others as socialism. |
| - Earl Warren |
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| 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 sans, righteous, unselfish public sentiment, it has no inherent right. |
| - William Allen White |
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| If you want to understand your government, don't begin by reading the Constitution. (It conveys precious little of the flavor of today's statecraft.) Instead, read selected portions of the Washington telephone directory containing listings for all the organizations with titles beginning with the word National. |
| - George Will |
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| No nation is fit to set in judgment upon any other nation. |
| - Woodrow Wilson |
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| The government, which was designed for the people, has got into the hands of the bosses and their employers, the special interests. An invisible empire has been set up above the forms of democracy. |
| - Woodrow Wilson |
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| 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 |
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| Government is an unnecessary evil. Human beings, when accustomed to taking responsibility for their own behavior, can cooperate on a basis of mutual trust and helpfulness. |
| - Fred Woodworth |
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