“Of all tasks of government the most basic is to protect its citizens against violence.”
“To administer is to govern: to govern is to reign. That is the essence of the problem.”
“Though the people support the government; the government should not support the people.”
“Today, if you invent a better mousetrap, the government comes along with a better mouse.”
“Large legislative bodies resolve themselves into coteries, and coteries into jealousies.”
“Nothing is more surprising than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few.”
“Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.”
“By definition, a government has no conscience. Sometimes it has a policy, but nothing more.”
“It is the duty of government to make it difficult for people to do wrong, easy to do right.”
“A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away.”
“My reading of history convinces me that most bad government results from too much government.”
“To govern is to choose. To appear to be unable to choose is to appear to be unable to govern.”
“It is very easy to accuse a government of imperfection, for all mortal things are full of it.”
“It is the duty of the President to propose and it is the privilege of the Congress to dispose.”
“A Government of the people, by the people and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
“Society is well governed when its people obey the magistrates, and the magistrates obey the law.”
“The constitution is not neutral. It was designed to take the government off the backs of people.”
“The whole country is one vast insane asylum and they're letting the worst patients run the place.”
“It is function of government to invent philosophies to explain the demands of its own convenience.”
“But their determination to banish fools foundered ultimately in the installation of absolute idiots.”
“In the councils of a state, the question is not so much, what ought to be done? As, what can be done?”
“The Athenians govern the Greeks; I govern the Athenians; you, my wife, govern me; your son governs you.”
“Too bad that all the people who know how to run the country are busy driving taxicabs and cutting hair.”
“The greater the hold of government upon the life of the individual citizen, the greater the risk of war.”
“Congress is so strange. A man gets up to speak and says nothing. Nobody listens, then everybody disagrees.”
“Any party which takes credit for the rain must not be surprised if its opponents blame it for the drought.”
“Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.”
“Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.”
“A government, for protecting business only, is but a carcass, and soon falls by its own corruption and decay.”
“Nations it may be have fashioned their Governments, but the Governments have paid them back in the same coin.”