“That government is best which governs least.”
“Good government is the outcome of private virtue.”
“Truth is the glue that holds government together.”
“The government is us; we are the government, you and I.”
“Even to observe neutrality you must have a strong government.”
“Government has no other end than the preservation of property.”
“Whenever you have an efficient government, you have a dictatorship.”
“The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem.”
“I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.”
“There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses.”
“Though the people support the government; the government should not support the people.”
“Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.”
“The constitution is not neutral. It was designed to take the government off the backs of people.”
“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.”
“Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.”
“Nations it may be have fashioned their Governments, but the Governments have paid them back in the same coin.”
“Government is like a baby. An alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no responsibility at the other.”
“The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only legitimate object of good government.”
“It is often said that men are ruled by their imaginations; but it would be truer to say they are governed by the weakness of their imaginations.”
“Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary, cruel, grasping and unintelligent.”
“Whenever the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government; that whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights.”
“Nothing is so galling to a people not broken in from the birth as a paternal, or in other words a meddling government, a government which tells them what to read and say and eat and drink and wear.”
“As long as our government is administered for the good of the people, and is regulated by their will; as long as it secures to us the rights of persons and of property, liberty of conscience and of the press, it will be worth defending.”
“The contented and economically comfortable have a very discriminating view of government. Nobody is ever indignant about bailing out failed banks and failed savings and loans associations. But when taxes must be paid for the lower middle class and poor, the government assumes an aspect of wickedness.”
“There is something to be said for government by a great aristocracy which has furnished leaders to the nation in peace and war for generations; even a democrat like myself must admit this. But there is absolutely nothing to be said for government by a plutocracy, for government by men very powerful in certain lines and gifted with the ''money touch,'' but with ideals which in their essence are merely those of so many glorified pawnbrokers.”
“Office without pay makes thieves.”
“It is easy to rule over the good.”
“The less government we have the better.”
“All good government must begin at home.”