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Government is a health hazard. Governments have killed many more people than cigarettes or unbuckled seat belts ever have.

— P. J. O'Rourke The Liberty Manifesto (1993)

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Government

More quotes by P. J. O'Rourke

She's wrong about absolutely everything, but she's wrong within normal parameters.

There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences.

The Liberty Manifesto (1993)

Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.

Parliament of Whores (1991)

Family love is messy, clinging, and of an annoying and repetitive pattern, like bad wallpaper.

There’s a whiff of the lynch mob or the lemming migration about any overlarge concentration of like-thinking individuals, no matter how virtuous their cause.

Parliament of Whores (1991)

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Ill can he rule the great, that cannot reach the small.

Edmund Spenser The Faerie Queene (1589)

The essence of Government is power; and power, lodged as it must be in human hands, will ever be liable to abuse.

James Madison

Bureaucracy and social harmony are inversely proportional to each other.

Leon Trotsky The Revolution Betrayed (1936)

There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.

John Adams

Attribution

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