"Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive."
Government quotes
Government
11.3K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Explore further
Topics related to Government
Browse quotes that often appear alongside government — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
Quote collection
Government quotes (page 7 of 568)
Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.
"That, in its essence, is Fascism — ownership of Government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power."
"You don't make the poor richer by making the rich poorer."
"If a strong government finds that it can, with impunity, destroy a weak people, then the hour has struck for that weak people to appeal to the League of Nations to give its judgment in all freedom. God and history will remember your judgment."
"Every government has as much of a duty to avoid war as a ship's captain has to avoid a shipwreck."
"In all the more advanced communities the great majority of things are worse done by the intervention of government than the individuals most interested in the matter would do them, or cause them to be done, if left to themselves."
"A union of government and religion tends to destroy government and to degrade religion."
"Big-government economics breeds crony capitalism. It's corrupt, anything but neutral, and a barrier to broad participation in prosperity."
"I want the people of America to be able to work less for the government, and more for themselves"
"We know now that government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob."
"Too often in recent history liberal governments have been wrecked on rocks of loose fiscal policy."
"It is certainly true that a popular government cannot flourish without virtue in the people."
"This used to be a government of checks and balances. Now it's all checks and no balances."
"The dangers of a concentration of all power in the general government of a confederacy so vast as ours are too obvious to be disregarded."
"You are responsible for the world that you live in. It is not government's responsibility. It is not your school's or your social club's or your church's or your neighbor's or your fellow citizen's. It is yours, utterly and singularly yours."
"The republican is the only form of government which is not eternally at open or secret war with the rights of mankind."
"All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities."
"Governments can err, Presidents do make mistakes, but the immortal Dante tells us that divine justice weighs the sins of the cold-blooded and the sins of the warm-hearted in different scales. Better the occasional faults of a Government that lives in a spirit of charity than the constant omission of a Government frozen in the ice of its own indifference."
"A Republic without parties is a complete anomaly. The histories of all popular governments show absurd is the idea of their attempting to exist without parties."
"The constitutionality and propriety of the Federal Government assuming to enter into a novel and vast field of legislation, namely, that of providing for the care and support of all those ... who by any form of calamity become fit objects of public philanthropy. ... I cannot find any authority in the Constitution for making the Federal Government the great almoner of public charity throughout the United States. To do so would, in my judgment, be contrary to the letter and spirit of the Constitution and subversive of the whole theory upon which the Union of these States is founded."