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Quotes about government

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This right to vote is the basic right without which all others are meaningless. It gives people, people as individuals, control over their own destinies.
Lyndon B. Johnson1908–1973Voting Rights Act signing speech (1965)
- Voting
Laws are no longer made by a rational process of public discussion; they are made by a process of blackmail and intimidation, and they are executed in the same manner.
H. L. Mencken1880–1956The American Mercury (May 1930)
- Laws
It has been observed that a pure democracy if it were practicable would be the most perfect government. Experience has proved that no position is more false than this.
Alexander Hamilton1757–1804Speech in New York, urging ratification of the U.S. Constitution (21 June 1788)
- Democracy
Do you never stop to reflect just what it is that America stands for? If she stands for one thing more than another, it is for the sovereignty of self-governing peoples.
Woodrow Wilson1856–1924Speech on Military Preparedness, Pittsburgh (29 January 1916)
- America
- Democracy
It’s a moral problem that the government is making into criminals people, who may be doing something you and I don’t approve of, but who are doing something that hurts nobody else.
Milton Friedman1912–2006America’s Drug Forum interview (1991)
- Morality
To have given each one of the million Negro free families a forty-acre freehold would have made a basis of real democracy in the United States that might easily have transformed the modern world.
W. E. B. Du Bois1868–1963Black Reconstruction in America (1935), p. 602
- Democracy
- Race
I’m not an American. I’m one of the 22 million black people who are the victims of Americanism. One of the 22 million black people who are the victims of democracy, nothing but disguised hypocrisy.
Malcolm X1925–1965Speech in Cleveland, Ohio (April 3, 1964)
If Taxes are laid upon us in any shape without our having a legal Representation where they are laid, are we not reduced from the Character of free Subjects to the miserable State of tributary Slaves?
Samuel Adams1722–1803Instructions to Boston’s Representatives (May 1764), also quoted in Samuel Adams: Radical Puritan (1997), by William M. Fowler Jr., p. 51
- Liberty
I’m struck by how laughter connects you with people. It’s almost impossible to maintain any kind of distance or any sense of social hierarchy when you’re just howling with laughter. Laughter is a force for democracy.
John Cleeseborn 1939From The Human Face, BBC Television (2001)
- Democracy
- Laughter
I believe that Facebook represents one of the gravest threats to democracies around the world, and I am amazed that we have allowed our freedoms to be taken away by technology companies’ greed for growth and revenues.
Maria Ressaborn 1963How to Stand Up to a Dictator (2022)
- Democracy
- Technology
The modern state appeals to morality, to religion, and to natural law as the ideological foundation of its existence. At the same time it is prepared to infringe any or all of these in the interest of self-preservation.
J. M. Coetzeeborn 1940Diary of a Bad Year (2007), p. 17
We want to take a chance on more democracy.
Willy Brandt1913–1992Government policy statement to the Bundestag (28 October 1969)
- Democracy
To govern well, one must see things as they are.
José Martí1853–1895Our America (1891)
The cure for the ills of Democracy is more Democracy.
Jane Addams1860–1935Democracy and Social Ethics (1902), ch. 1; cf. Al Smith
- Democracy
There is no one to talk to since Mahatma Gandhi died.
Vladimir Putinborn 1952Responding to a question “Former Federal Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder called you a ‘pure democrat’. Do you consider yourself such?” June 4, 2007
- Democracy
- Politics