A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.

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Source, in full

Attributed to Reagan from informal remarks to reporters 10 October 1984,and to students and faculty at St. John's University 28 March 1985. The statement was made a decade earlier by Gerald Ford in an address to a Joint Session of the Congress, 12 August 1974. It is sometimes attributed to Thomas Jefferson and Barry Goldwater.

Notes from Wikiquote

Similar assertions have often been attributed to Barry Goldwater. Some of the inspiration for such expressions may lie in "The Criminality of the State" by Albert Jay Nock in American Mercury (March 1939) where he stated: "You get the same order of criminality from any State to which you give power to exercise it; and whatever power you give the State to do things for you carries with it the equivalent power to do things to you."

Variants

A government that is big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take everything you have.

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Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Ronald Reagan (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.