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Government Quotes

Jefferson leads this page, followed by Milton Friedman, Robert LeFevre and Lincoln. Most of it is political philosophy, with a few jokes mixed in: P. J. O’Rourke in Parliament of Whores (1991) says giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys, and Will Rogers, in 1935, said a comedian needs no credit when the whole government is working for him.

Two well-known lines are flagged. “Men must be governed by God or they will be ruled by tyrants” is credited to William Penn, but the oldest wording the notes cite is from a 1949 speech by Norman Vincent Peale. The one about a government big enough to give you everything being big enough to take it away is credited to Barry Goldwater, and the notes point to older versions of it.

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Most quoted on government:

We know it because democracy alone, of all forms of government, enlists the full force of men's enlightened will.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

The masses must be made to see that the Soviets of Workers' Deputies are the only possible form of revolutionary government.

Vladimir Lenin April Thesis (1917)

Any imposition of government censorship on the media is a step in the direction of State control, a step which big money is most reluctant to take.

William S. Burroughs The Adding Machine: Collected Essays (1985)

Government picks winners and losers all the time.

Jon Stewart The Problem with Jon Stewart (2021)

What other form of government, indeed, can so well deserve our esteem and love?

John Adams Inaugural Address (1797)

The way to make peace is not through governments. It is through people.

Shimon Peres

Variant: I shall kick their teeth in. I am appointing the government. I am appointing the government by the support of this nation!

Ruhollah Khomeini

To state a timetable now would simply paralyze the proper working of government, put at risk the changes we are making for Britain and damage the country.

Tony Blair

Gabby called it "Congress on Your Corner" — just an updated version of government of and by and for the people.

Barack Obama Tucson Memorial Address (2011)

In any type of socialist state, Nazi or Communist, the government's economic plan is part of the supreme law of the land.

George Reisman Why Nazism Was Socialism and Why Socialism Is Totalitarian (2005)

It is our desire to see the emergence of a coalition government that is truly representative of the people of Kampuchea.

Mahathir Mohamad

A government that is clean, efficient and trustworthy will speed up development and enable Malaysians to live a better life.

Mahathir Mohamad

I only want the government to do the things that you can't do without the government.

Walter Reuther Television interview with Mike Wallace (1960)

Under the Labour Government in the last eighteen months Britain has behaved, perfectly clearly and perfectly recognizably, as an American satellite.

Enoch Powell

The true American patriot is by definition skeptical of the government.

Sarah Vowell The Partly Cloudy Patriot (2003)

Government seems unaware that the more race-based measures it tries to put in place the faster that time bomb burns to detonation point.

Epeli Ganilau

The way to stop abortion is to deal, philosophically and spiritually, with the people who get them. And that's not something government can touch.

Jesse Ventura I Ain't Got Time To Bleed (1999)

Any government has as much of a duty to avoid war as a ship's captain has to avoid a shipwreck.

Guy de Maupassant Sur l’eau (1888)

The plague of government is senile delinquency.

Mignon McLaughlin The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981)

Bad enough to have killed a man,” he believes they will say to themselves, “without helping the Party’s, the government’s, the country’s enemies, as well

Nadine Gordimer The Moment Before the Gun Went Off (1988)

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