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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"Anyway, why would you trust anything written down? She certainly didn't trust "Mothers of Borogravia!" and that was from the government. And if you couldn't trust the government, who could you trust? Very nearly everyone, come to think of it."
"If the government ever imposes a tax on books - and I wouldn't put it past them - I'm in dead trouble."
"One of the hardest lessons in young Sam's life had been finding out that the people in charge weren't in charge. It had been finding out that governments were not, on the whole, staffed by people who had a grip, and that plans were what people made instead of thinking."
"There is too much government today. We've got to remember the government should be by the people, of the people, and for the people."
"The social or economic structure of the ideal state is of little concern to me. My desires are modest. Portraits of the head of the government should not exceed a postage stamp in size. No torture and no executions. No music, except coming through earphones, or played in theaters. Freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom of art."
"Ours is a government of liberty by, through, and under the law. A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be great or a democracy."
"There is something to be said for government by a great aristocracy which has furnished leaders to the nation in peace and war for generations; even a Democrat like myself must admit this."
"Kings and such are just as funny as politicians."
"The bulk of government is not legislation but administration."
"McKinley shows all the background of a chocolate eclair."
"Under government ownership corruption can flourish just as rankly as under private ownership."
"Of all the officers of the Government, those of the Department of Justice should be kept most free from any suspicion of improper action on partisan or factional grounds, so that there shall be gradually a growth, even though a slow growth, in the knowledge that the Federal courts and the representatives of the Federal Department of Justice insist on meting out even-handed justice to all."
"The corporation that shrinks from the light" would have anything to fear from government. About the welfare of such corporations we need not be oversensitive."
"All the spaces between my mind and the mind of God are full of truths waiting to be crystallized into laws for the government of the masses."
"We both [with Donald Trump] share a desire to ensure that governments are working for everyone and particularly that governments are working for ordinary working families and working-class families. And I think that's important. That's what I've spoken about."
"We campaigned on the fact that we were going to have to take difficult decisions because of the state of the public finances. When we got into government we discovered that actually the public finances were in an even worse state than we thought..."
"Any large extension of the Government into business affairs - no matter what the pretense and no matter how the the extension is labeled - will be bound to promote waste and put a curb on our prosperity and progress."
"Government is emphatically a machine: to the discontented a taxing machine, to the contented a machine for securing property."
"What is nature? Art thou not the living government of God? O Heaven, is it in very deed He then that ever speaks through thee, that lives and loves in thee, that lives and loves in me?"
"Government is, by its very nature, a destroyer of liberties; the Obama administration, specifically, is promising to interfere with the economy and the health care system so profoundly that Washington will soon have us all in chains."
