Government - Select Quotes
June 6, 2008
The worst thing in the world next to anarchy, is government.
~ Henry Ward Beecher, in Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit, 1867
In its reality, the state is always organized selfishness.
~ Emil Brunner, in The Divine Imperative (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1947) page 460
What can be more noble than the government of the state by virtue? For then the man who rules others is not himself a slave to any passion, but has already acquired for himself all those qualities to which he is training and summoning his fellows. such a man imposes no laws upon th epopple that he does not obey himself, but puts his own life before his fellow-citizens as their law.
~ Cicero, in Republic
A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.
~ Gerald R. Ford, in Time magazine November 8, 1976
Above all, we should not forget, that government is, abstractly speaking, an evil, an usurpation up the private judgment and individual conscience of mankind; and that, however we may be obliged to admit it as a necessary evil for the present, it behooves us, as the friends of reason and the human species, to admit as little of it as possible, and carefully to observe, whether in consequence of the gradual illumination of the human mind, that little may not hereafter be diminished.
~ William Godwin, in An Inquiry Concerning Political Justice, and Its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness, vol. 2, bk. v, ch. 1
Government can’t give us anything without depriving us of something else.
~ Henry Hazlitt
Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education of minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.
~ George Washington
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