government

1.

The advance planning and sense stimuli employed to capture a $10 million cigarette or soap market are nothing compared to the brainwashing and propaganda blitzes used to ensure control of the largest cash market in the world: the Executive Branch of the United States Government.

- Schlafly, Phyllis

2.

Anyone who is different today faces harassment, whether it is in the way he dresses, or in the position he takes on important issues. And when the price of being different is a cold fear, with good reason, then freedom as we peddle it in our international publicity releases is gone. If and when it disappears, it won't be stolen by big government, the tax collector, or the Supreme Court. Fascism will be the people's choice. It usually is. We've managed to avoid it so far only because nobody nutty enough to give the people what they want has come along. Yet.

- Mike Royko

3.

No government ought to be without censors; and where the press is free, no one ever will. Chance is the pseudonym of God when he did not want to sign.

- France, Anatole

4.

OPPOSITION, n. In politics the party that prevents the Government from running amuck by hamstringing it. The King of Ghargaroo, who had been abroad to study the science of government, appointed one hundred of his fattest subjects as members of a parliament to make laws for the collection of revenue. Forty of these he named the Party of Opposition and had his Prime Minister carefully instruct them in their duty of opposing every royal measure. Nevertheless, the first one that was submitted passed unanimously. Greatly displeased, the King vetoed it, informing the Opposition that if they did that again they would pay for their obstinacy with their heads. The entire forty promptly disemboweled themselves. "What shall we do now?" the King asked. "Liberal institutions cannot be maintained without a party of Opposition." "Splendor of the universe," replied the Prime Minister, "it is true these dogs of darkness have no longer their credentials, but all is not lost. Leave the matter to this worm of the dust." So the Minister had the bodies of his Majesty's Opposition embalmed and stuffed with straw, put back into the seats of power and nailed there. Forty votes were recorded against every bill and the nation prospered. But one day a bill imposing a tax on warts was defeated -- the members of the Government party had not been nailed to their seats! This so enraged the King that the Prime Minister was put to death, the parliament was dissolved with a battery of artillery, and government of the people, by the people, for the people perished from Ghargaroo.

- Ambrose Bierce

5.

A little rebellion now and then... is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government.

- Jefferson, Thomas

6.

The basis of effective government is public confidence.

- Kennedy, John F.

7.

To rule is not so much a question of the heavy hand as the firm seat.

- Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

8.

I am really sorry to see my countrymen trouble themselves about politics. If men were wise, the most arbitrary princes could not hurt them. If they are not wise, the freest government is compelled to be a tyranny. Princes appear to me to be fools. Houses of Commons and Houses of Lords appear to me to be fools; they seem to me to be something else besides human life.

- Blake, William

9.

Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.

- Frederick Bastiat

10.

It is not the function of our Government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the Government from falling into error.

- Jackson, Robert H.

11.

The chief element in the art of statesmanship under modern conditions is the ability to elucidate the confused and clamorous interests which converge upon the seat of government. It is an ability to penetrate from the na?ve self-interest of each group to its permanent and real interest. Statesmanship consists in giving the people not what they want but what they will learn to want.

- Lippmann, Walter

12.

Friends and neighbors, the taxes are indeed very heavy, and if those laid on by the government were the only ones we had to pay, we might more easily discharge them; but we have many others, and much more grievous to some of us. We are taxed twice as much by our idleness, three times as much by our pride, and four times as much by our folly; and from these taxes the commissioners cannot ease or deliver us by allowing abatement.

- Franklin, Benjamin

13.

It is a fact that God does punish here, in this life. He does not, as false preachers say, give over this life to impunity and this world to the devil, and only resume the reigns of moral government and the right of retribution when men die and go into the next world. Here in this life He punishes sin. Slowly but surely God punishes. If any of you doubt my words you have only to commit sin and then see whether your sin will find you out.

- Sermons on David. 1866.

14.

Write on my gravestone: Infidel, Traitor.--infidel to every church that compromises with wrong; traitor to every government that oppresses the people.

- Phillips, Wendell

15.

There are men so incorrigibly lazy that no inducement that you can offer will tempt them to work; so eaten up by vice that virtue is abhorrent to them, and so inveterately dishonest that theft is to them a master passion. When a human being has reached that stage, there is only one course that can be rationally pursued. Sorrowfully, but remorselessly, it must be recognized that he has become lunatic, morally demented, incapable of self-government, and that upon him, therefore, must be passed the sentence of permanent seclusion from a world in which he is not fit to be at large.

- Booth, William

16.

There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses.

- Jackson, Andrew

17.

When I am abroad, I always make it a rule to never criticize or attack the government of my own country. I make up for lost time when I come home.

- Churchill, Winston

18.

A little rebellion now and then...is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government.

- Thomas Jefferson

19.

What experience and history teach is this—that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.

- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

20.

Its embarrassing, you try to overthrow the government and you wind up on a Best Sellers List.

- Abbie Hoffman