Famous Quotes & Sayings

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The problem is to find a form of association which will defend and protect with the whole common force the person and goods of each associate, and in which each, while uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone, and remain as free as before.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Government originated in the attempt to find a form of association that defends and protects the person and property of each with the common force of all.

Jessica Lange

Yes, and you should question your government.

Jeremy Bentham

No power of government ought to be employed in the endeavor to establish any system or article of belief on the subject of religion.

Jeremy Bentham

Secrecy, being an instrument of conspiracy, ought never to be the system of a regular government.

Jeremy Bentham

Among the several cloudy appellatives which have been commonly employed as cloaks for misgovernment, there is none more conspicuous in this atmosphere of illusion than the word Order.

Jeremy Bentham

Without publicity, no good is permanent; under the auspices of publicity, no evil can continue.

Jeremy Bentham

All government is a trust. Every branch of government is a trust, and immemorially acknowledged to be so.

Jennifer Dunn

Only with our government are you given a certificate at birth, a license at marriage, and a bill at death.

Jeff Sessions

Those policies - more taxes, more regulation, more debt, more spending, more government - will make American worse. It just will, in my view.

Jeff Sessions

You're not supposed to be admitted to America if you're likely to be a charge on the public - if you're going to need government aid to take care of yourself ... It [2006 immigration bill] failed because it did not do what it said it would do... End the illegality first. Then we can wrestle with how to treat compassionately people who have been in America for a long time.

Grover Norquist

I want to reduce the size of government in half as a percentage of GNP [gross national product] over the next 25 years. We want to reduce the number of people depending on government so there is more autonomy and more free citizens.

Grover Norquist

Look, the center right coalition in American politics today is best understood as a coalition of groups and individuals that on the issue that brings them to politics what they want from the government is to be left alone.

Grover Norquist

The question is: How do we reduce spending from 25% of GDP, which is where Obama put us? The focus is on total government spending. Can we bring it down, in a reasonable and politically acceptable way? That's what the Paul Ryan plan does. It puts us on a gradual reform path to reducing the size of government.

Grover Norquist

Government should enforce rule of law. It should enforce contracts, it should protect people bodily from being attacked by criminals. And when the government does those things, it is facilitating liberty. When it goes beyond those things, it becomes destructive to both human happiness and human liberty.

Grover Norquist

The goal is to reduce the size and scope of government spending, not to focus on the deficit. The deficit is the symptom of the disease.

Grover Cleveland

Once the coffers of the federal government are opened to the public, there will be no shutting them again.

Grover Cleveland

Under our scheme of government the waste of public money is a crime against the citizen.

Howard Zinn

Very important thing to keep in mind, that when justice comes and when injustices are remedied, they’re not remedied by the initiative of the national government or the politicians. They only respond to the power of social movements.

Gina McCarthy

When consumers do not take full advantage of efficiency gains, it is because they are weighing other factors that influence their decision making. When the federal government arbitrarily places one of those factors over others, it makes consumers worse off.

James Bovard

Liberty is a political firewall that limits the damage government can do to the individual.

James Bovard

The government's appearing to be a necessary evil does not oblige people to trust it. We face a choice of trusting government or trusting freedom-trusting overlords who have lied and abused their power or trusting individuals to make the most of their own lives.

James Bovard

As soon as people drop the reins on government, government will leash the people.

Government is in place for our survival and to hopefully promote justice and peace.

Hutton Gibson

They're after one world religion and one world government. That's why they've attacked the Catholic Church so strongly, to ultimately take control over it by their doctrine.

Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo

The people want government that works for them at every level. They want good government that begins at their doorstep in the barangay, and does not end before the closed door of a bureaucrat in Metro Manila.

James Buchanan

The distribution of patronage of the Government is by far the most disagreeable duty of the President.

James Buchanan

The Government of the United States possesses no power whatever over the question of religion.

J. William Fulbright

"Our government will soon become what it is already a long way toward becoming, an elective dictatorship.

J. R. R. Tolkien

The main mark of modern governments is that we do not know who governs, de facto any more than de jure. We see the politician and not his backer; still less the backer of the backer; or, what is most important of all, the banker of the backer.

Francis Schaeffer

If there is no final place for civil disobedience, then the government has been made autonomous, and as such, it has been put in the place of the living God.

Francis Schaeffer

We must realize that the Reformation world view leads in the direction of government freedom. But the humanist world view with inevitable certainty leads in the direction of statism. This is so because humanists, having no god, must put something at the center, and it is inevitably society, government, or the state.

Francis Quarles

Of all the difficulties in a state, the temper of a true government most felicifies and perpetuates it; too sudden alterations distemper it. Had Nero tuned his kingdom as he did his harp, his harmony had been more honorable, and his reign more prosperous.