“The care of human life and happiness and not their destruction is the first and only legitimate object of good government.” ——Thomas Jefferson
“Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force; like fire, a troublesome servant and a fearful master. Never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action.” ——George Washington
“The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people, it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government — lest it come to dominate our lives and interests.” ——Patrick Henry
“The country is headed toward a single and splendid government of an aristocracy founded on banking institutions and monied corporations, and if this tendency continues it will be the end of freedom and democracy, the few will be ruling and riding over the plundered plowman and the beggar.” ——Thomas Jefferson
“In a country well governed poverty is something to be ashamed of. In a country badly governed wealth is something to be ashamed of.” ——Confucius
“Democracy is when the indigent, and not the men of property, are the rulers.” ——Aristotle
“The deterioration of every government begins with the decay of the principles on which it was founded.” ——Charles-Louis De Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu
“The evils of government are directly proportional to the tolerance of the people.” ——Frank Kent
“In the eyes of empire builders men are not men but instruments.” ——Napoleon Bonaparte
“The government is the potent omnipresent teacher. For good or ill it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. To declare that the end justifies the means — to declare that the government may commit crimes — would bring terrible retribution.” ——Justice Louis D. Brandeis
“The greatest country, the richest country, is not that which has the most capitalists, monopolists, immense grabbings, vast fortunes, with its sad, sad soil of extreme, degrading, damning poverty, but the land in which there are the most homesteads, freeholds — where wealth does not show such contrasts high and low, where all men have enough — a modest living — and no man is made possessor beyond the sane and beautiful necessities.” ——Walt Whitman
“A State divided into a small number of rich and a large number of poor will always develop a government manipulated by the rich to protect the amenities represented by their property.” ——Harold Laski
“The individual is handicapped by coming face to face with a conspiracy so monstrous he cannot believe it exists.” ——J. Edgar Hoover
“The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.” ——Tacitus
“The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.” ——Thomas Jefferson
“Governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deducted from it.” ——Hebbel
“If the Soviet empire still existed, I’d be terrified. The fact is, we can afford a fairly ignorant presidency now.” ——Newt Gingrich
“The people who cast the votes don’t decide an election, the people who count the votes do.” ——Joseph Stalin
“Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner.” ——James Bovard
“Elections are won by men and women chiefly because most people vote against somebody rather than for somebody.” ——Franklin P. Adams
“Always vote for principle, though you may vote alone, and you may cherish the sweetest reflection that your vote is never lost.” ——John Quincy Adams
“The people are the ultimate guardians of their own liberties. In every government on earth is some trace of human weakness, some germ of corruption and degeneracy. Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone.” ——Thomas Jefferson
“The shepherd always tries to persuade the sheep that their interests and his own are the same.” ——Marie Beyle
“The soul of our country needs to be awakened… When leaders act contrary to conscience, we must act contrary to leaders.” ——Veterans Fast for Life
“The state has, in order to control us, introduced division into our thinking, so that we come to distrust others and look to the state for protection! But the roots of our individualism remind us that what we are is inseparable from the source from which all others derive; that coercive practices that threaten our neighbor also threaten us.” ——Butler Shaffer
“The test of every religious, political, or educational system, is the man which it forms. If a system injures the intelligence it is bad. If it injures the character it is vicious. If it injures the conscience it is criminal.” ——Henri Frédéric Amiel
“The trade of governing has always been monopolized by the most ignorant and the most rascally individuals of mankind.” ——Thomas Paine
“There is absolutely nothing to be said for government by a plutocracy, for government by men very powerful in certain lines and gifted with ‘a money touch,’ but with ideals which in their essence are merely those of so many glorified pawnbrokers.” ——Theodore Roosevelt
“There is no nonsense so errant that it cannot be made the creed of the vast majority by adequate governmental action.” ——Bertrand Russell
“The true civilization is where every man gives to every other every right that he claims for himself.” ——Robert Ingersoll
“These things I believe: That government should butt out. That freedom is our most precious commodity and if we are not eternally vigilant government will take it all away. That individual freedom demands individual responsibility. That government is not a necessary good but an unavoidable evil. That the executive branch has grown too strong, the judicial branch too arrogant and the legislative branch too stupid. That political parties have become close to meaningless. That government should work to insure the rights of the individual, not plot to take them away. That government should provide for the national defense and work to insure domestic tranquility. That foreign trade should be fair rather than free. That once a year we should hang someone in government as an example to his fellows.” ——Lyn Nofziger
“This focus on money and power may do wonders in the marketplace, but it creates a tremendous crisis in our society. People who have spent all day learning how to sell themselves and to manipulate others are in no position to form lasting friendships or intimate relationships… Many Americans hunger for a different kind of society — one based on principles of caring, ethical and spiritual sensitivity, and communal solidarity. Their need for meaning is just as intense as their need for economic security.” ——Michael Lerner
“Today democracy is a facade of plutocracy. Because the peoples will not tolerate naked plutocracy, power is nominally turned over to them, while real power rests in the hands of the plutocrats. In democracies, whether republican or monarchical, the statesmen are marionettes, and the capitalists are the wire pullers: they dictate the political guidelines, they control the voters by buying public opinion, through business and social connections they control higher government officials. The plutocracy of today is more powerful than the aristocracy of the past, because nothing stands above it except the state, which is its tool and helper.” ——Count Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi
“Today, when a concerted effort is made to obliterate this point, it cannot be repeated too often that the Constitution is a limitation on the government, not on private individuals — that it does not prescribe the conduct of private individuals, only the conduct of the government — that it is not a charter for government power, but a charter of the citizen’s protection against the government.” ——Ayn Rand
“Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.” ——Henry David Thoreau
“Unless you become more watchful in your States and check this spirit of monopoly and thirst for exclusive privileges, you will in the end find that the most important powers of Government have been given or bartered away, and the control of your dearest interests have been passed into the hands of these corporations.” ——Andrew Jackson
“As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.” ——H. L. Mencken
“Remember democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” ——John Adams
“We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force.” ——Ayn Rand
“It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.” ——Voltaire
“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
“We are reluctant to admit that we owe our liberties to men of a type that today we hate and fear — unruly men, disturbers of the peace, men who resent and denounce what Whitman called ‘the insolence of elected persons’ — in a word, free men.” ——Gerald W. Johnson
“We are the ruling race of the world. We will not renounce our part in the mission of our race, trustee, under God, of the civilization of the world. He has marked us as his chosen people. He has made us adept in government that we may administer government among savage and senile peoples.” ——Sen. Alfred Beveridge
“It’s not the voting that’s democracy, it’s the counting.” ——Alfred Emanuel Smith
“We can have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth in a few hands, but we can’t have both.” ——Louis D. Brandeis
“We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated governments in the world — no longer a government of free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and duress of small groups of dominant men.” ——Woodrow Wilson
“We have got rid of the fetish of the divine right of kings, and that slavery is of divine origin and authority. But the divine right of property has taken its place. The tendency plainly is towards ‘a government of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich.” ——Rutherford Birchard Hayes
“We, as individuals, are fast losing our reputation for honest dealing. Our nation is losing its character. The loss of a firm national character, or the degradation of a nation’s honour, is the inevitable prelude to her destruction.” ——William Wells Brown
“We’re not a democracy. It’s a terrible misunderstanding and a slander to the idea of democracy to call us that. In reality, we’re a plutocracy: a government by the wealthy.” ——Ramsey Clark
“I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country.” ——Thomas Jefferson
“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
“The National Government will regard it as its first and foremost duty to revive in the nation the spirit of unity and cooperation. It will preserve and defend those basic principles on which our nation has been built. It regards Christianity as the foundation of our national morality, and the family as the basis of national life.” ——Adolf Hitler
“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
“When a long train of abuses and usurpations evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government.” ——Thomas Jefferson
“When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.” ——P. J. O’Rourke
“When governments state that certain events have not happened, and yet we have the victims before us to testify that they did, government loses its credibility, and it loses its authority. We see before us today governments that lack natural authority and have to make up for that by the use of force. They do not have the support of the people because they are not trusted by the people. We hear many fine words seeking national unity, cooperation and harmony, yet, almost in the same breath orders are given to military units to shoot civilians, protesters are rounded up, many disappear, many are tortured. No government which governs by the use of force can survive except by force. There is no going back because force begets force and the perpetrators of crimes live in fear that they might become victims in their turn.” ——Bishop Carlos Felipe Ximenes Belo
“The government, which was designed for the people, has got into the hands of the bosses and their employers, the special interests. An invisible empire has been set up above the forms of democracy.” ——Woodrow T. Wilson
“When law and morality contradict each other, the citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense or losing his respect for the law.” ——Frederic Bastiat
“With numbing regularity good people were seen to knuckle under the demands of authority and perform actions that were callous and severe. Men who are in everyday life responsible and decent were seduced by the trappings of authority, by the control of their perceptions, and by the uncritical acceptance of the experimenter’s definition of the situation, into performing harsh acts. A substantial proportion of people do what they are told to do, irrespective of the content of the act and without limitations of conscience, so long as they perceive that the command comes from a legitimate authority.” ——Stanley Milgram
“The enormous gap between what US leaders do in the world and what Americans think their leaders are doing is one of the great propaganda accomplishments.” ——Michael Parenti
“The ideal tyranny is that which is ignorantly self-administered by its victims. The most perfect slaves are, therefore, those which blissfully and unawaredly enslave themselves.” ——Dresden James
“All the public business in Congress now connects itself with intrigues, and there is great danger that the whole government will degenerate into a struggle of cabals.” ——John Quincy Adams
“In America, we have a system in which multi-billionaire elitists select millionaire candidates for the Democratic and Republican parties. The people are then free to select which candidates they think will screw them the least. We call this Democracy.” ——Gary Amirault
“They cannot commit treason, nor be outlawed, nor excommunicated, for they have no souls.” ——Lord Edward Coke
“Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn’t mean politics won’t take an interest in you.” ——Pericles
“When shall it be said in any country of the world, my poor are happy, neither ignorance or distress is to be found among them; my jails are empty of prisoners, my streets of beggars; the aged are not in want, the taxes not oppressive; the rational world is my friend because I am friend of its happiness. When these things can be said, then may that country boast of its constitution and government.” ——Thomas Paine
“When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.” ——Thomas Jefferson
“Whenever a man casts a longing eye on offices, a rottenness begins in his conduct.” ——Thomas Jefferson
“Nothing doth more harm in a state than when cunning men pass for wise.” ——Sir Francis Bacon
“The state has had a vested interest in promoting attitudes that would tend to make us skeptical of our own abilities, fearful of the motives of others, and emotionally dependent upon external authorities for purpose and direction in our lives.” ——Butler D. Shaffer
“Those Who Will Not be Governed By God Will Be Ruled by Tyrants.” ——William Penn
“Circus dogs jump when the trainer cracks his whip.” ——George Orwell
“The State enjoys a monopoly not only on the lawful use of violence, but on the power to define the extent of its authority.” ——Butler Shaffer
“Men in authority will always think that criticism of their policies is dangerous. They will always equate their policies with patriotism, and find criticism subversive.” ——Henry Steele Commager
“Those in power need checks and restraints lest they come to identify the common good for their own tastes and desires, and their continuation in office as essential to the preservation of the nation.” ——Justice William O. Douglas
“Whenever the legislators endeavor to take away and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves into a state of war with the people, who are thereupon absolved from any further obedience.” ——John Locke
“If men use their liberty in such a way as to surrender their liberty, are they thereafter any the less slaves? If people by a plebiscite elect a man despot over them, do they remain free because the despotism was of their own making?” ——Herbert Spencer
“People constantly speak of ‘the government’ doing this or that, as they might speak of God doing it. But the government is really nothing but a group of men, and usually they are very inferior men.” ——H. L. Mencken
“Governments and citizens blend together only in the imagination of political theorists. Government is, and always will be, an alien power over private citizens.” ——James Bovard
“The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable.” ——H. L. Mencken
“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
“If once the people become inattentive to the public affairs, you and I, and Congress and Assemblies, Judges and Governors, shall all become wolves. It seems to be the law of our general nature, in spite of individual exceptions.” ——Thomas Jefferson
“We hold that what one man cannot morally do, a million men cannot morally do, and government, representing many millions of men, cannot do.” ——Auberon Herbert
“The government is merely a servant — merely a temporary servant; it cannot be its prerogative to determine what is right and what is wrong, and decide who is a patriot and who isn’t. Its function is to obey orders, not originate them…” ——Mark Twain
“It’s important to realize that whenever you give power to politicians or bureaucrats, it will be used for what they want, not for what you want.” ——Harry Browne
“As government grows, its increased power to grant favors or inflict pain attracts more people who would abuse the system.” ——John Fund
“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
“What the government is good at is collecting taxes, taking away your freedoms and killing people. It’s not good at much else.” ——Tom Clancy
“But you must remember, my fellow-citizens, that eternal vigilance by the people is the price of liberty, and that you must pay the price if you wish to secure the blessing. It behooves you, therefore, to be watchful in your States as well as in the Federal Government.” ——Andrew Jackson
“Free government is founded in jealousy, not confidence. It is jealousy and not confidence which prescribes limited constitutions, to bind those we are obliged to trust with power… In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in men, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.” ——Thomas Jefferson
“This is the tendency of all human governments. A departure from principle in one instance becomes a precedent for a second, that second for a third, and so on till the bulk of the society is reduced to be mere automatons of misery, to have no sensibilities left but for sinning and suffering… And the forehorse of this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follows that, and in its train wretchedness and oppression.” ——Thomas Jefferson
“One can be assured that governments that spend heavily on ‘intelligence agencies’ have at their highest levels ‘murders, liars and thieves’ who ‘come but to kill steal and destroy.ʼ” ——Amitai Tsedek
“There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution.” ——Aldous Huxley
“All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume.” ——Noam Chomsky
“You made your rulers mighty, gave them guards,
So now you groan ‘neath slavery’s heavy rod.” ——Solon
“And say, finally, whether peace is best preserved by giving energy to the government or information to the people. This last is the most legitimate engine of government. Educate and inform the whole mass of people. Enable them to see that it is their interest to preserve peace and order, and they will preserve them. And it requires no very high degree of education to convince them of this. They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.” ——Thomas Jefferson
“When you start believing the government, start questioning your beliefs.” ——Author Unknown
“Socialism is GREAT — UNTIL you run out of other people’s money.” ——Margaret Thatcher
“Government is a disease masquerading as its own cure.” ——Bob LeFevre
“When the government’s boot is on your throat, whether it is a left boot or a right boot is of no consequence.” ——Gary Lloyd
“I am a mortal enemy to arbitrary government and unlimited power.” ——Thomas Jefferson
“It is the responsibility of the patriot to protect his country from its government.” ——Thomas Paine
“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.” ——Frederic Bastiat
“In a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.” ——Matt Taibbi
“We live in a system that espouses merit, equality, and a level playing field, but exalts those with wealth, power, and celebrity, however gained.” ——Derrick Bell