Skip to content

"The papers exaggerate. They exaggerate everything, just to sell papers. The government exaggerates, to keep our minds off what morons they are."

— John Updike Rabbit at Rest (1990)

Another quote →

Topics

Government

More quotes by John Updike

Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.

Buchanan Dying : A Play (1974)

But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography.

On T. S. Eliot (1984)

Yes, there is a ton of information on the web, but much of it is egregiously inaccurate, unedited, unattributed and juvenile.

America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.

The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.

All John Updike quotes →

You may also like

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: John Updike (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.