Different men seek after happiness in different ways and by different means, and so make for themselves different modes of life and forms of government.
Democracy... is a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder and dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequals alike.
We are persuaded that good Christians will always be good citizens, and that where righteousness prevails among individuals the Nation will be great and happy. Thus while just government protects all in their religious rights, true religion affords to government it's surest support.
How does it become a man to behave towards the American government today? I answer, that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it.
The basis of our political system is the right of the people to make and to alter their constitutions of government.
What is ominous is the ease with which some people go from saying that they don't like something to saying that the government should forbid it. When you go down that road, don't expect freedom to survive very long.
When the federal government spends more each year than it collects in tax revenues, it has three choices: It can raise taxes, print money, or borrow money. While these actions may benefit politicians, all three options are bad for average Americans.
If the people cannot trust their government to do the job for which it exists - to protect them and to promote their common welfare - all else is lost.
I'd rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.
If you like small government you need to work hard at having a strong national defense that is not so militant. Personal liberty is the purpose of government, to protect liberty - not to run your personal life, not to run the economy, and not to pretend that we can tell the world how they ought to live.
A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.
A free America... means just this: individual freedom for all, rich or poor, or else this system of government we call democracy is only an expedient to enslave man to the machine and make him like it.
When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know, the end result is tyranny and oppression no matter how holy the motives.
By definition, a government has no conscience. Sometimes it has a policy, but nothing more.
Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.
Democracy is a form of government that substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.
It may be laid down as a primary position, and the basis of our system, that every Citizen who enjoys the protection of a Free Government, owes not only a proportion of his property, but even of his personal services to the defense of it.
I am just absolutely convinced that the best formula for giving us peace and preserving the American way of life is freedom, limited government, and minding our own business overseas.
Fascism should rightly be called Corporatism, as it is the merger of corporate and government power.
Only government can take perfectly good paper, cover it with perfectly good ink and make the combination worthless.
Do not separate text from historical background. If you do, you will have perverted and subverted the Constitution, which can only end in a distorted, bastardized form of illegitimate government.
The punishment which the wise suffer who refuse to take part in the government, is to live under the government of worse men.
The real goal should be reduced government spending, rather than balanced budgets achieved by ever rising tax rates to cover ever rising spending.
The art of government is to make two-thirds of a nation pay all it possibly can pay for the benefit of the other third.
Society in every state is a blessing, but government, even in its best stage, is but a necessary evil in its worst state an intolerable one.
A democratic government is the only one in which those who vote for a tax can escape the obligation to pay it.
I believe there is something out there watching us. Unfortunately, it's the government.
On account of being a democracy and run by the people, we are the only nation in the world that has to keep a government four years, no matter what it does.
Now, let me be clear. The path I lay out is not one paved with ever increasing government checks and cradle to grave assurance that government will always be the solution. If this election is a bidding war for who can promise the most goodies and the most benefits, I'm not your president. You have that president today.
There are many people who feel that it is useless and futile to continue talking about peace and non-violence against a government whose only reply is savage attacks on an unarmed and defenceless people.
If you make any money, the government shoves you in the creek once a year with it in your pockets, and all that don't get wet you can keep.
Many people want the government to protect the consumer. A much more urgent problem is to protect the consumer from the government.
There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.
I spent my whole life in the private sector, 25 years in the private sector. I understand that when government takes more money out of the hands of people, it makes it more difficult for them to buy things. If they can't buy things, the economy doesn't grow. If the economy doesn't grow, we don't put Americans to work.
It's easy being a humorist when you've got the whole government working for you.
The Great Depression, like most other periods of severe unemployment, was produced by government mismanagement rather than by any inherent instability of the private economy.
The greatest advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science and literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government.
There is only one kind of freedom and that's individual liberty. Our lives come from our creator and our liberty comes from our creator. It has nothing to do with government granting it.
The only sure bulwark of continuing liberty is a government strong enough to protect the interests of the people, and a people strong enough and well enough informed to maintain its sovereign control over the goverment.
I am sometimes a fox and sometimes a lion. The whole secret of government lies in knowing when to be the one or the other.