Famous Quotes & Sayings

Harold Pinter

Most of the press is in league with government, or with the status quo.

James Dean

An actual right is something that governments need merely to secure, not to implement.

James Bryce

There is in the American Government...a want of unity.... The Sailors, the helmsman, the engineer, do not seem to have one purpose or obey one will so that instead of making steady way the vessel may pursue a devious or zigzag course, and sometimes merely turn round and round in the water.

James Bryce

No government demands so much from the citizens as democracy and none gives back so much.

James Bryce

The massacres are the result of a policy which, as far as can be ascertained, has been entertained for some considerable time by the gang of unscrupulous adventurers who are now in possession of the Government of the Turkish Empire. They hesitated to put it in practice until they thought the favorable moment had come, and that moment seems to have arrived about the month of April.

James Bovard

Foreign aid breeds kleptocracies, or governments of thieves.

James Bovard

Government aid programs have been endlessly expanded, and the government has sought to maximize the number of people willing to accept handouts..... Roughly half of all Americans are dependent on the government, either for handouts, pensions, or paychecks.

James Bovard

Liberty is a political firewall that limits the damage government can do to the individual.

James Bovard

The government's appearing to be a necessary evil does not oblige people to trust it. We face a choice of trusting government or trusting freedom-trusting overlords who have lied and abused their power or trusting individuals to make the most of their own lives.

James Bovard

The sheer number of government employees and welfare recipients effectively transforms the purpose of government from maintaining order to confiscating as much as possible from vulnerable taxpayers.

James Bovard

It is absurd to expect governments to descend gradually, step-by-step into barbarism - as if there was a train schedule to political hell and people could get off at any stop along the way.

James Bovard

As soon as people drop the reins on government, government will leash the people.

James Bovard

However accurate or inaccurate the agency's numbers may be, tax law explicitly presumes that the IRS is always right -- and implicitly presumes that the taxpayer is always wrong -- in any dispute with the government. In many cases, the IRS introduces no evidence whatsoever of its charges; it merely asserts that a taxpayer had a certain amount of unreported income and therefore owes a proportionate amount in taxes, plus interest and penalties.

James Bovard

Once a person becomes a government dependent, his moral standing to resist the expansion of government power is fatally compromised.

James Bovard

American democracy is capsizing as a result of the vast increase in the number of government dependents and government employees.

James Bovard

Governments and citizens blend together only in the imaginations of political theorists. Government is, and always will be, an alien power over private citizens. There is no magic in a ballot box that makes government any less coercive.

James Bovard

The people = government doctrine is equivalent to political infantilism -- an agreement to pretend that the citizen's wishes animate each restriction or exaction inflicted upon him.

James Bovard

America needs fewer laws, not more prisons. By trying to seize far more power than is necessary over American citizens, the federal government is destroying its own legitimacy. We face a choice not of anarchy or authoritarianism, but a choice of limited government or unlimited government .

James Bovard

If an election is simply a one-day snapshot of transient mass delusions, then this is not a very noble form of government.

James Bovard

If so many Americans are looking for the government to save them, then it is hard to have a dignified search for a shepherd in chief.

James Bovard

The more freedoms Americans lose, the more dangerous government becomes.

James Bovard

The only things government can do are regulate and redistribute, prohibit and penalize, confiscate and command. Are these the things that liberty is made of? Somebody else's money and an endless list of Thou Shalt Nots?

James Bovard

It is unfortunate that Americans are no longer aware of what the constitution says and what their rights are. Because of that, we are often very passive about what happens when the government violates those rights.

James Bovard

The more people expect from government, the more biased they become against limiting government power.

James Bovard

If citizens wish to retain their liberty, they cannot assume that those who seek power over them are honest. Skepticism of government is one of the most important-and most forgotten-bulwarks of freedom.

James Bovard

It is one of the great tragedies of the US, that most learn most of what they know about the government from the government.

Jairam Ramesh

Agitation is all about poetry, governance is all about prose.

Jacques Attali

Global governance is just a euphemism for global government.

Jacques Delors

If you don't have collective agreements between unions and employers, governments have to legislate more.

James Buchanan

The distribution of patronage of the Government is by far the most disagreeable duty of the President.

James Buchanan

The Government of the United States possesses no power whatever over the question of religion.

J. William Fulbright

"Our government will soon become what it is already a long way toward becoming, an elective dictatorship.

J. R. R. Tolkien

The main mark of modern governments is that we do not know who governs, de facto any more than de jure. We see the politician and not his backer; still less the backer of the backer; or, what is most important of all, the banker of the backer.