“The challenges that America faces are not terrorism and oil supply. The challenges that we face are the police state that Bush has created and the disrespect for truth that is endemic in government, the universities, and the media. The US has entered a dark age of dogmas and unaccountable power.” ——Paul Craig Roberts
“A people living under the perpetual menace of war and invasion is very easy to govern. It demands no social reforms. It does not haggle over expenditures for armaments and military equipment. It pays without discussion, it ruins itself, and that is an excellent thing for the syndicates of financiers and manufacturers for whom patriotic terrors are an abundant source of gain.” ——Anatole France
“Now those who seek absolute power, even though they seek it to do what they regard as good, are simply demanding the right to enforce their own version of heaven on earth, and let me remind you they are the very ones who always create the most hellish tyranny.” ——Barry Goldwater
“He therefore is the truest friend to the liberty of his country who tries most to promote its virtue, and who, so far as his power and influence extend, will not suffer a man to be chosen into any office of power and trust who is not a wise and virtuous man… The sum of all is, if we would most truly enjoy this gift of Heaven, let us become a virtuous people.” ——Samuel Adams
“I have chiefly had men’s views confided to me privately. Some of the biggest men in the U.S., in the field of commerce and manufacturing, are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it.” ——Woodrow Wilson
“Every collectivist revolution rides in on a Trojan horse of ’emergency’. It was the tactic of Lenin, Hitler, and Mussolini. In the collectivist sweep over a dozen minor countries of Europe, it was the cry of men striving to get on horseback. And ’emergency’ became the justification of the subsequent steps. This technique of creating emergency is the greatest achievement that demagoguery attains.” ——Herbert Hoover
“What experience and history teach is this — that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.” ——Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
“In order to get power and retain it, it is necessary to love power; but love of power is not connected with goodness but with qualities that are the opposite of goodness, such as pride, cunning and cruelty.” ——Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy
“The test of every religious, political, or educational system is the man that it forms.” ——Henri-Frédéric Amiel
“The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the large centers has owned the government of the U.S. since the days of Andrew Jackson.” ——Franklin D. Roosevelt
“Find out just what people will quietly submit to, and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.” ——Frederick Douglass
“The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to the point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself. That in its essence is fascism — ownership of government by an individual, by a group or any controlling private power.” ——Franklin D. Roosevelt
“The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.” ——Bertrand Russell
“Because I think a general Government necessary for us, and there is no form of Government but what may be a blessing to the people if well administered, and believe farther that this is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in Despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic Government, being incapable of any other.” ——Benjamin Franklin
“Free enterprise is a term that refers, in practice, to a system of public subsidy and private profit, with massive government intervention in the economy to maintain a welfare state for the rich.” ——Noam Chomsky
“There is no nation on earth powerful enough to accomplish our overthrow… Our destruction, should it come at all, will be from another quarter. From the inattention of the people to the concerns of their government, from their carelessness and negligence, I must confess that I do apprehend some danger. I fear that they may place too implicit a confidence in their public servants, and fail properly to scrutinize their conduct; that in this way they may be made the dupes of designing men, and become the instruments of their own undoing.” ——Daniel Webster
“A centralized democracy may be as tyrannical as an absolute monarch; and if the vigour of the nation is to continue unimpaired, each individual, each family, each district, must preserve as far as possible its independence, its self-completeness, its powers and its privilege to manage its own affairs and think its own thoughts.” ——James Anthony Froude
“Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner.” ——James Bovard
“A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.” ——George Bernard Shaw
“A great industrial Nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the Nation and all our activities are in the hands of a few men.” ——Author Unknown
“A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murder is less to fear.” ——Marcus Tullius Cicero
“A nation which can prefer disgrace to danger is prepared for a master, and deserves one!” ——Alexander Hamilton
“The issue today is the same as it has been throughout all history, whether man shall be allowed to govern himself or be ruled by a small elite.” ——Thomas Jefferson
“The deterioration of every government begins with the decay of the principles on which it was founded.” ——Charles-Louis De Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu
“A people may prefer a free government, but if, from indolence, or carelessness, or cowardice, or want of public spirit, they are unequal to the exertions necessary for preserving it; if they will not fight for it when it is directly attacked; if they can be deluded by the artifices used to cheat them out of it; if by momentary discouragement, or temporary panic, or a fit of enthusiasm for an individual, they can be induced to lay their liberties at the feet even of a great man, or trust him with powers which enable him to subvert their institutions; in all these cases they are more or less unfit for liberty: and though it may be for their good to have had it even for a short time, they are unlikely long to enjoy it.” ——John Stuart Mill
“A popular government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.” ——James Madison
“A society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves.” ——Bertrand de Jouvenel
“A state which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands — even for beneficial purposes — will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished.” ——John Stuart Mill
“I never could believe that Providence had sent a few men into the world, ready booted and spurred to ride, and millions ready saddled and bridled to be ridden.” ——Richard Rumbold
“Abolish plutocracy if you would abolish poverty.” ——Rutherford Birchard Hayes
“An honest politician is one who, when he is bought, stays bought.” ——Simon Cameron
“An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.” ——Plutarch
“Any man who wants to be president is either an egomaniac or crazy.” ——Dwight D. Eisenhower
“As I watch government at all levels daily eat away at our freedom, I keep thinking how prosperity and government largesse have combined to make most of us fat and lazy and indifferent to, or actually in favor of, the limits being placed on that freedom.” ——Lyn Nofziger
“As soon as people drop the reins on government, government will leash the people.” ——James Bovard
“Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day.” ——Theodore Roosevelt
“But it was impossible to save the Great Republic. She was rotten to the heart. Lust of conquest had long ago done its work; trampling upon the helpless abroad had taught her, by a natural process, to endure with apathy the like at home; multitudes who had applauded the crushing of other people’s liberties, lived to suffer for their mistake in their own persons. The government was irrevocably in the hands of the prodigiously rich and their hangers-on; the suffrage was become a mere machine, which they used as they chose. There was no principle but commercialism, no patriotism but of the pocket.” ——Mark Twain
“By a declaration of rights, I mean one which shall stipulate freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of commerce against monopolies, trial by juries in all cases, no suspensions of the habeas corpus, no standing armies. These are fetters against doing evil which no honest government should decline.” ——Thomas Jefferson
“Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.” ——Harry S. Truman
“Can we truly expect that those who aim to exploit us can be trusted to educate us?” ——Eric Schaub
“Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that numbers of people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of the leaders of their government and have gone to war, and millions have been killed because of this obedience… Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty.” ——Howard Zinn
“We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.” ——Aesop
“Conquered states that have been accustomed to liberty and the government of their own laws can be held by the conqueror in three different ways. The first is to ruin them; the second, for the conqueror to go and reside there in person; and the third is to allow them to continue to live under their own laws, subject to a regular tribute, and to create in them a government of a few, who will keep the country friendly to the conqueror.” ——Niccolò Machiavelli
“Democracy is a process, not a static condition. It is becoming rather than being. It can easily be lost, but is never fully won. Its essence is eternal struggle.” ——William H. Hastie
“Don’t buy a single vote more than necessary. I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay for a landslide.” ——Joseph P. Kennedy
“Each candidate behaved well in the hope of being judged worthy of election. However, this system was disastrous when the city had become corrupt. For then it was not the most virtuous but the most powerful who stood for election, and the weak, even if virtuous, were too frightened to run for office.” ——Niccolò Machiavelli
“Corruption and hypocrisy ought not to be inevitable products of democracy, as they undoubtedly are today.” ——Mahatma Gandhi
“For in every city these two opposite parties are to be found, arising from the desire of the populace to avoid oppression of the great, and the desire of the great to command and oppress the people… For when the nobility see that they are unable to resist the people, they unite in exalting one of their number and creating him prince, so as to be able to carry out their own designs under the shadow of his authority.” ——Niccolò Machiavelli
“Here is my first principle of foreign policy: good government at home.” ——William Ewart Gladstone
“Our government teaches the whole people by its example. If the government becomes the lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy.” ——Louis D. Brandeis
“It is hard to feel individually responsible with respect to the invisible processes of a huge and distant government.” ——John W. Gardner
“It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.” ——Thomas Jefferson
“For in reason, all government without the consent of the governed is slavery.” ——Jonathan Swift