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Quotes about government

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The end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom. For in all the states of created beings, capable of laws, where there is no law there is no freedom.
John Locke1632–1704Second Treatise of Government, Ch. VI, sec. 57
- Freedom
- Laws
While the people retain their virtue and vigilance, no administration, by any extreme of wickedness or folly, can very seriously injure the government in the short space of four years.
Abraham Lincoln1809–1865Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address (1861)
- Democracy
No government, any more than an individual, will long be respected without being truly respectable; nor be truly respectable without possessing a certain portion of order and stability.
James Madison1751–1836Federalist No. 62
That it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer, is a maxim that has been long and generally approved; never, that I know of, controverted.
Benjamin Franklin1706–1790Letter to Benjamin Vaughan, on Blackstone’s Ratio (14 March 1785)
- Justice
- Laws
Public confidence in the integrity of the Government is indispensable to faith in democracy; and when we lose faith in the system, we have lost faith in everything we fight and spend for.
Adlai Stevenson II1900–1965Speech to the Los Angeles Town Club, Los Angeles, California (11 September 1952); Speeches of Adlai Stevenson (1952), p. 31
- Democracy
The interpretation of constitutional principles must not be too literal. We must remember that the machinery of government would not work if it were not allowed a little play in its joints.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.1841–1935Writing for the Court, Bain Peanut Co. v. Pinson, 282 U.S. 499, 501 (1931).
- Laws
Here, in the first paragraph of the Declaration [of Independence], is the assertion of the natural right of all to the ballot; for how can “the consent of the governed” be given, if the right to vote be denied?
Susan B. Anthony1820–1906On the United States Declaration of Independence in her “Is It a Crime for a Citizen of the United States to Vote?” speech before her trial for voting (1873)
- Democracy
- Voting
No tyranny is more cruel than the one practiced in the shadow of the laws and under color of justice — when, so to speak, one proceeds to drown the unfortunate on the very plank by which they had saved themselves.
Montesquieu1689–1755Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline (1734), p. 89
- Justice
- Laws
The divine right of kings may have been a plea for feeble tyrants; but the divine right of government is the keystone of human progress, and without it governments sink into police, and a nation is degraded into a mob.
Benjamin Disraeli1804–1881Lothair (1870), Preface.
When I say “capitalism,” I mean a full, pure, uncontrolled, unregulated laissez-faire capitalism⁠—with a separation of state and economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of state and church.
Ayn Rand1905–1982The Virtue of Selfishness (1964)
- Economics
The moral test of government is how it treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the aged; and those in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped.
Hubert Humphrey1911–1978Remarks at the dedication of the Hubert H. Humphrey Building, November 1, 1977, Congressional Record, November 4, 1977, vol 123, p. 37287.
- Morality
I am obliged to confess I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.
William F. Buckley Jr.1925–20081963 statement, as quoted in Ralph Keyes, The Quote Verifier (2006), p. 82
- Clever Jabs
He who first shortened the labor of copyists by device of movable types was disbanding hired armies, and cashiering most kings and senates, and creating a whole new democratic world: he had invented the art of printing.
Thomas Carlyle1795–1881Sartor Resartus (1833–1834), Bk. I, ch. 5.
- Democracy
- Technology
Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.
Hannah Arendt1906–1975The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), Part 3, Chapter 10
- Power
I work for a Government I despise for ends I think criminal.
John Maynard Keynes1883–1946Letter to Duncan Grant (15 December 1917)
- Work