Famous Quotes & Sayings

Walter Lippmann

What the public does is not to express its opinions but to align itself for or against a proposal. If that theory is accepted, we must abandon the notion that democratic government can be the direct expression of the will of the people. We must abandon the notion that the people govern. Instead, we must adopt the theory that, by their occasional mobilisations as a majority, people support or oppose the individuals who actually govern. We must say that the popular will does not direct continuously but that it intervenes occasionally.

Voltaire

It is the characteristic of the most stringent censorships that they give credibility to the opinions they attack.

Voltaire

An ideal form of government is democracy tempered with assassination.

William Tecumseh Sherman

To those who would submit to the rightful law and authority, all gentleness and forbearance; but to the petulant and persistent secessionists, why, death is mercy, and the quicker he or she is disposed of the better. Satan and the rebellious saints of Heaven were allowed a continuous existence in hell merely to swell their just punishment. To such as would rebel against a Government so mild and just as ours was in peace, a punishment equal would not be unjust.

William Rehnquist

In any civilized society the most important task is achieving a proper balance between freedom and order. In wartime, reason and history both suggest that this balance shifts in favor... of the government's ability to deal with conditions that threaten the national well-being.

William Powell

A government creates its own revolution. There can be no revolt without it.

William Powell

Every person, whether in wartime or not, should keep a pistol and rifle in his house at all times. If a person is not going to protect himself, and wishes the government to do it for him, how can he complain when the government decides to protect itself against him, and executes him?

William Ralph Inge

Democracy is only an experiment in government, and it has the obvious disadvantage of merely counting votes instead of weighing them.

William Lloyd Garrison

You can not possibly have a broader basis for government than that which includes all the people, with all their rights in their hands, and with an equal power to maintain their rights.

William Lloyd Garrison

What shall be said, then, of those who insist upon ignoring the question of slavery as not involved in this deadly feud, and maintain that the only issue is, the support of the government and the preservation of the Union? Surely, they are "fools and blind"; for it is slaveholders alone who have conspired to seize the one, and overturn the other. As long as the enslavement of a single human being is sanctioned in the land, the curse of God will rest upon it.

Wilhelm von Humboldt

The government is best which makes itself unnecessary.

Walter Ulbricht

The government of the German Democratic Republic rejects secret policies. It works for the people, and only the people, so it does not need to keep secrets like the warmongers.

Walter Wriston

Every line in the government's budget has its own constituency.

Walter Savage Landor

A mercantile democracy may govern long and widely; a mercantile aristocracy cannot stand.

Vladimir Putin

Every head of state and government in the world is allowed to have his opinion and to voice it.

Vladimir Putin

History proves that all dictatorships, all authoritarian forms of government are transient. Only democratic systems are not transient. Whatever the shortcomings, mankind has not devised anything superior.

Yochai Benkler

Bringing an end to mass government surveillance needs to be a central pillar of returning to the principles we have put in jeopardy in the early 21st century.

Yitzhak Rabin

What I, as the prime minister of the present government of Israel, started to do, is first to tackle the longest part of the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Yitzhak Rabin

Vis a vis the Golan Heights, the present government of Israel, under my leadership, is the first government that is ready to speak about a withdrawal.

Yitzhak Rabin

It is the duty of the government to guarantee maximum security, and this is not an easy task.

Winston Churchill

Democracy is a very bad form of government ... but all the others are so much worse.

Winston Churchill

The Government of India had imprisoned Mr. Gandhi and they had been sitting outside his cell door begging him to help them out of their difficulties.

Winston Churchill

They have done what they like. Their difficulty is to like what they have done.

Winston Churchill

He has to conceal what he would most wish to make public, and make public what he would most wish to conceal.

Winston Churchill

Elections exist for the sake of the House of Commons and not the House of Commons for the sake of elections.

Winston Churchill

it is the people who control the Government, not the Government the people.

Winston Churchill

You don't make the poor richer by making the rich poorer.

William S. Burroughs

A functioning police state needs no police.

William S. Burroughs

There is simply no room left for 'freedom from the tyranny of government' since city dwellers depend on it for food, power, water, transportation, protection, and welfare. Your right to live where you want, with companions of your choosing, under laws to which you agree, died in the eighteenth century with Captain Mission. Only a miracle or a disaster could restore it.

William Lyon Mackenzie King

It is what we prevent, rather than what we do that counts most in Government.

William Lyon Mackenzie King

Government, in the last analysis, is organized opinion. Where there is little or no public opinion, there is likely to be bad government.

William Kristol

Conservatives shouldn't count on the Supreme Court to do our work for us on Obamacare. The Court may rule as it should, and strike down the mandate. But it may not. And even if it does, the future of health care in America - and for that matter, the future of limited government - depends ultimately on the verdict of the American people.

William J. Brennan

Debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust and wide-open and that...may well include vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials.