Quotes about Government

Greed and the pursuit of personal gain will be the downfall of any governmental system.

"Concentrated power can be always wielded in the interest of the few and at the expense of the many. Government in its last analysis is this power reduced to a science. Governments never lead; they follow progress. When the prison, stake or scaffold can no longer silence the voice of the protesting minority, progress moves on a step, but not until then".

I need someone to protect me from all the measures they take in order to protect me.

The whole country is one vast insane asylum and they're letting the worst patients run the place.

I once defined "government" as "a system of murder, rape, extortion, coercion, theft, intimidation, and terror, the absence of which, it is said, would lead to disorder."

If you doubt this characterization then confront these hard facts: during the 20th century, governments managed to kill 200 million men, women, and children in wars, genocides, and other acts of formalized violence. During that same century, how many people were killed by individuals acting without political authority?

The tragedy of modern war is not so much that the young men die but that they die fighting each other - instead of their real enemies back home in the capitals.

Most of what I really need to know about how to live and what to do and how to be I learned in kindergarten. Wisdom was not at the top of the graduate school mountain, but there in the sandpile at Sunday school. These are the things I learned: Share everything.
Play fair.
Don't hit people.
Put things back where you found them.
Clean up your own mess.
Don't take things that aren't yours.
Say you're sorry when you hurt somebody.
Wash your hands before you eat.
Flush.
Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you.
Live a balanced life - learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some.
Take a nap every afternoon.
When you go out into the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands and stick together.
Be aware of wonder.
Everything you need to know is in there somewhere.  The Golden Rule and love and basic sanitation.  Ecology and politics and equality and sane living.  Take any one of those items and extrapolate it into sophisticated adult terms and apply it to your family life or your work or your government or your world and it holds true and clear and firm.  Think what a better world it would be if we all - the whole world - had cookies and milk about three o'clock every afternoon and then lay down with our blankies for a nap.  Or if all governments had as a basic policy to always put things back where they found them and to clean up their own mess.  And it is true, no matter how old you are - when you go out into the world, it is best to hold hands and stick together.

A leader leads from in front, by the power of example. A ruler pushes from behind, by means of the club, the whip, the power of fear.

Representative government has broken down. Our politicians represent not the people who vote for them but the commercial interests who finance their election campaigns. We have the best politicians money can buy.

Government: If you refuse to pay unjust taxes, your property will be confiscated. If you attempt to defend your property, you will be arrested. If you resist arrest, you will be clubbed. If you defend yourself against clubbing, you will be shot dead. These procedures are known as the Rule of Law.

Anarchism is not a romantic fable but the hard-headed realization, based on five thousand years of experience, that we cannot entrust the management of our lives to kings, priests, politicians, generals, and county commissioners.

The purpose and function of government is not to preside over change but to prevent change. By political methods when unavoidable, by violence when convenient.

Counterpart to the knee-jerk liberal is the new knee-pad conservative, always groveling before the rich and the powerful.

No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets.

A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.

I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government

The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact.

The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact.

War, it will be seen, accomplishes the necessary destruction, but accomplishes it in a psychologically acceptable way. In principle it would be quite simple to waste the surplus labour of the world by building temples and pyramids, by digging holes and filling them up again, or even by producing vast quantities of goods and then setting fire to them. But this would provide only the economic and not the emotional basis for a hierarchical society. What is concerned here is not the morale of masses, whose attitude is unimportant so long as they are kept steadily at work, but the morale of the Party itself.

Our campaign was not hatched in the halls of Washington –- it began in the backyards of Des Moines and the living rooms of Concord and the front porches of Charleston. ...This is your victory.  

I believe in a lively disrespect for most forms of authority.

Governments would rather spend their money on another bomber than education, and why do we fear black men when every bit of suffering in our lives has a Caucasian face attached to it?

In former times the chief method of justifying the use of violence and thereby infringing the law of love was by claiming a divine right for the rulers: the Tsars, Sultans, Rajahs, Shahs and other heads of states.

The concept of free competition enforced by law is a grotesque contradiction in terms.

The state is the great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else.

Governmental subsidy systems promote inefficiency in production and efficiency in coercion and subservience, while penalizing efficiency in production and inefficiency in predation.

The whole difficulty I think that that we're facing now is the question of who is going to ensure that corporations are accountable. The problem with leaving it to activists and non-governmental organizations—even with the tool of the Internet at their disposal—is that those organizations and those people don't have the legal right to compel corporations to disclose information, and that is something that governments can do. Governments can can send inspectors to companies. Governments can put legal requirements in place to disclose information that consumers and workers and other interested people need. Non-governmental organizations don't have that legal power and to me, that's what imposes substantial limitiations on how far we can go with trying to keep corporations accountable though non-governmental measures.

I have come to the conclusion that one useless man is called a disgrace, two useless men are called a law firm, and three or more become a Congress.

Today, nobody sees, or wishes to see, that in our time the enslavement of the majority of men is based on money taxes, levied on land and otherwise, which are collected by government from the subjects.

When one uses the simple monosyllabic 'France' one thinks of France as a unit, an entity. When. . . we say 'France sent her troops to conquer Tunis'—we impute not only unity but personality to the country. The very words conceal the facts and make international relations a glamorous drama in which personalized nations are the actors, and all too easily we forget the flesh-and- blood men and women who are the true actors.. . if we had no such word as 'France' . . . then we should more accurately describe the Tunis expedition in some such way as this: 'A few of...thirty-eight million persons sent thirty thousand others to conquer Tunis.' This way of putting the fact immediately suggests a question, or rather a series of questions. Who are the 'few'? Why did they send the thirty thousand to Tunis? And why did these obey? Empire-building is done not by 'nations,' but by men. The problem before us is to discover the men, the active, interested minorities in each nation, who are directly interested in imperialism and then to analyze the reasons why the majorities pay the expenses and fight the wars.