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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"No good government can ever want more than two things for its support: 1st, Its own excellence; and, 2dly, a people sufficiently instructed, to be aware of that excellence. Every other pretended support, must ultimately tend to its subversion, by lessening its dependence upon these."
"By the time of the United States Tricentennial, there will be more government workers than there are workers."
"How our government works... it doesn't."
"There should be a law that you can't shut down the government - that you don't have that power."
"Democracy is nothing more than an experiment in government, more likely to succeed in a new soil, but likely to be tried in all soils, which must stand or fall on its own merits as others have done before it. For there is no trick of perpetual motion in politics any more than in mechanics."
"It is a general maxim that all governments find a use for as much money as they can raise. Indeed, they have commonly demands for more...I take this as a settled truth, that they will all spend as much as their revenue; that is, will live up to their income."
"Nowadays, the media have to be there to keep you from asking too many questions, from getting together with other people who might want to do the Jeffersonian thing and call out the government."
"There's nothing new about the government protecting corporations and calling it the freeing of the world or bringing democracy to bereft nations."
"Americans are poorly served by their media, you know, for the war machine and propaganda machine and the global empire and they're poorly served by what they are being told is representative government."
"Quite often governments are one way and the people are another."
"The governments of the great States have two instruments for keeping the people dependent, in fear and obedience: a coarser, the army; and a more refined, the school."
"Never has the divide between the iPhone world and the politics world been so clear: I saw a bunch of people very well-served by their computers and telephones (very often Apple products) but undeniably shortchanged by our government-run cartel education system. And the tragedy for them - and for us - is that they will spend their energy trying to expand the sphere of the ineffective, hidebound, rent-seeking, unproductive political world, giving the . . .politicians. . .an even stronger whip hand over the Steve Jobses and Henry Fords - and we will be the poorer for it."
"I returned to Afghanistan because I had a deep longing to see for myself how people lived, what they thought of their government, how optimistic they were about the future of their homeland."
"Wherefore being all of one mind, we do highly resolve that government of the grafted by the grafter for the grafter shall not perish from the earth."
"Greece is a bleak, unsmiling desert, without agriculture, manufactures or commerce, apparently. What supports its poverty-stricken people or its Government, is a mystery."
"When politics enter into municipal government, nothing resulting therefrom in the way of crimes and infamies is then incredible. It actually enables one to accept and believe the impossible."
"The laws of Nature, that is to say the laws of God, plainly made every human being a law unto himself, we must steadfastly refuse to obey those laws, and we must as steadfastly stand by the conventions which ignore them, since the statutes furnish us peace, fairly good government, and stability, and therefore are better for us than the laws of God, which would soon plunge us into confusion and disorder and anarchy if we should adopt them."
"The Soviet government sprouted and grew out of the habits, the psychology, and the condition of the Russian people. It fitted them. They understand it."
"Quebecers have rarely in their history been better represented than they are right now - at the highest levels of the federal government."
"We plan to lift the veil of secrecy surrounding the preparation of the budget. We also plan to open up the process of government appointments."
