Government quotes
11.3K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside government — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"Refined policy ever has been the parent of confusion, and ever will be so as long as the world endures. Plain good intention, which is as easily discovered at the first view as fraud is surely detected at last, is of no mean force in the government of mankind."
"No government ought to exist for the purpose of checking the prosperity of its people or to allow such a principle in its policy."
"The moment that government appears at market, the principles of the market will be subverted."
"It is the love of the people; it is their attachment to their government, from the sense of the deep stake they have in such a glorious institution, which gives you your army 168 and your navy, and infuses into both that liberal obedience, without which your army would be a base rabble, and your navy nothing but rotten timber."
"It must be that to govern a nation you need a specific talent and that this may very well exist without general ability."
"People look at me in many ways. They've said, 'The guy has no regard for money.' That is not true. I have had regard for money. It depends on who's saying that. Some people worship money as something you've got to have piled up in a big pile somewhere. I've only thought about money in one way, and that is to do something with it. I don't think there's a thing I own that I will ever get the benefit of except through doing things with it. I don't even want the dividends from the stock in the studio, because the government's going to take it away. I'd rather have that in (the company) working."
"Man is about the same, in the main, whether with despotism, or whether with freedom."
"Under the specious pretext of effecting 'the happiness of the whole community,' nearly all the wrongs and intrusions of government has been carried through."
"Where do you get the gall to call the people who died in 9/11 technocrats when you sit around and get a $90,000 paycheck from the government you purport to hate?"
"I think the oversight is great, and I think that oversight ought to be devoted almost entirely to the question is this being done at market you know. In other words, you want to make sure that the government isn't investing foolishly. But you don't want to care about which congressional districts it goes to or whether banks get favored over."
"Let only individuals contribute - with sensible limits per election. Otherwise, we are well on our way to ensuring that a government of the moneyed, by the moneyed, and for the moneyed shall not perish from the earth."
"We have provided capital here with a couple of institutions recently. The Federal government did that in the '30s for the RFC and I think there could well be a proper role for government in that."
"If you can eliminate the government as a 39.6% partner, then you will be much better off."
"[The U.S. Treasury] can borrow basically unlimited amounts. They can stay there for years and years. These assets will be worth more money over time. So when Merrill Lynch sells a bunch of mortgage-related assets at 22 cents on the dollar like they did a month or so ago, the buyer goes - is going to make money, and he's going to make a lot more money if it happens to be an institution like the U.S. government which has very, very cheap borrowing costs."
"Resolution Trust Company was set up to liquidate a bunch of assets that the government had inherited because the savings and loans went broke."
"We're paying maybe 25 percent of the income tax, but the payroll tax is over a third of the receipts of the federal government. And they don't take that from me on capital gains. They don't take that from me on dividends."
"If you want a government that's going to do the things we ask our government to do, you've got to get it from somebody."
"I ask the Philippines Government to put an end to journalists' killings by giving journalists' safety the priority it deserves."
"I hope telling the story of how I went from being a single mom to serving in the Texas State Senate to running for governor will remind others that with the right leadership in government, where you start has nothing to do with how far you go."
"The vision of Christ that thou dost see is my vision's greatest enemy . Both read the Bible day and night, but thou read'st black where I read white. His seventy disciples sent against religion and government ."
