Government Authority Quotes

#1. I'm convinced that today the majority of Americans want what those first Americans wanted: A better life for themselves and their children; a minimum of government authority.

Ronald Reagan

#2. Democrats believe we must have comprehensive health care reform that includes giving the federal government authority to negotiate lower prices with drug companies.

Jim Clyburn

#3. But, no matter how big or small dictators are, they all accept 100 percent the principle that granting government authority to manipulate our lives and control our property is legitimate and morally acceptable.

Ron Paul

#4. Taking legislative authority away from the federal government doesn't necessarily mean freer individuals. It might just mean granting vastly more authority to the states
which already have far broader police powers than most of us would care to admit.

Dahlia Lithwick

#5. What is this thing we call government? Is it anything but organized violence? The law orders you to obey, and if you don't obey, it will compel you by force - all governments, all law and authority finally rest on force and violence, on punishment or fear of punishment.

Alexander Berkman

#6. Change marriage and you change the world. Convince people that government, not God, lays down the rules for marriage, and they will believe more strongly that they determine right and wrong, that not even the world's rulers are subject to a higher authority.

R.C. Sproul

#7. What are the moral convictions most fondly held by barbarous and semi-barbarous people? They are the convictions that authority is the soundest basis of belief; that merit attaches to readiness to believe; that the doubting disposition is a bad one, and skepticism is a sin.

Thomas Huxley

#8. Under the United States Constitution, the federal government has no authority to hold states "accountable" for their education performance ... In the free society envisioned by the founders, schools are held accountable to parents, not federal bureaucrats.

Ron Paul

#9. The best government rests on the people, and not on the few, on persons and not on property, on the free development of public opinion and not on authority.

George Bancroft

#10. The appointment of senators by the state legislatures ... is recommended by the double advantage of favoring a select appointment, and of giving to the state governments such an agency in the formation of the federal government, as must secure the authority of the former.

James Madison

#11. The government believed that adherence to authority was human nature, so the Gezi protests were a real surprise to them. After the initial moment of shock, they decided to severely punish those participating in what they called an act of disobedience to authority.

Safak Pavey

#12. And I think, in the end, that is the best definition of journalism I have heard; to challenge authority - all authority - especially so when governments and politicians take us to war, when they have decided that they will kill and others will die.

Robert Fisk

#13. Whereas, the Senate of the United States, devoutly recognizing the Supreme Authority and just Government of Almighty God, in all the affairs of men and of nations, has, by a resolution, requested the President to designate and set apart a day for National prayer and humiliation ...

Abraham Lincoln

#14. A press that has validity is a press that has authority. And as soon as there's any authority to what the press says, you question the authority of the government - it's like the existence of another authority.

Stephen Colbert

#15. Nature's government spontaneously brings satisfaction to everyone because it promotes all innumerable, diverse tendencies of life in the evolutionary direction.

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

#16. The right solemnly proclaimed at the birth of the States, and which has been affirmed and reaffirmed in the bills of rights of the States subsequently admitted into the Union of 1789, undeniably recognizes in the people the power to resume the authority delegated for the purposes of Government.

Jefferson Davis

#17. An established government has an infinite advantage, by that very circumstance of its being established
the bulk of mankind being governed by authority, not reason, and never attributing authority to anything that has not the recommendation of antiquity.

David Hume

#18. Government is the assumption of authority over a given area and all within it, exercised generally for the double purpose of more complete oppression of its subjects and extension of its boundaries.

Benjamin Tucker

#19. We support too big to fail. We want the government to be able to take down a big bank like JP Morgan and it could be done. We think Dodd-Frank, which we supported parts of, gave the FDIC the authority to take down a big bank.

Jamie Dimon

#20. No Government has the moral authority to dismantle the universally understood meaning of marriage.

Keith O'Brien

#21. The kingdom of God is an order of government established by divine authority. It is the only legal government that can exist in any part of the universe.

Orson Pratt

#22. The net poses a fundamental threat not only to the authority of the government, but to all authority, because it permits people to organize, think, and influence one another without any institutional supervision whatsoever.

John Seabrook

#23. The source of the government's authority is "the consent of the governed." This means that the government is not the ruler, but the servant or agent of the citizens; it means that the government as such has no rights except the rights delegated to it by the citizens for a specific purpose.

Ayn Rand

#24. A new State of Israel with broad frontiers, strong and solid, with the authority of the Israel Government extending from the Jordan to the Suez Canal.

Moshe Dayan

#25. The ultimate authority resides in the people, and that if the federal government got too powerful and overstepped its authority, then the people would develop plans of resistance and resort to arms.

James Madison

#26. The fate of every democracy, of every government based on the sovereignty of the people, depends on the choices it makes between these opposite principles, absolute power on the one hand, and on the other the restraints of legality and the authority of tradition.

John Acton

#27. The United States recognizes the provisional government as the de facto authority of the new State of Israel.

Harry S. Truman

#28. Erik was one of those inadequate people who were so scared by life that they preferred to live under harsh authority, to be told what to do and what to think by a government that allowed no dissent. They were foolish and dangerous, but there were an awful lot of them.

Ken Follett

#29. I was never interested in the two-party system per se. I was interested in how authority was abused by government, and how lies were told, and rewritten, to seem to be true. I came up out of a tradition of radical journalism.

Jules Feiffer

#30. The official government radio station was still broadcasting that the New York Power Authority would have power back up to Con Edison and lower Manhattan

Matthew Mather

#31. We're going to protect and honor the Constitution, and I don't have the authority to set it aside ... If I had the authority to set it aside, this would be a dangerous government, and I wouldn't respect it.

John Ashcroft

#32. Freedom is the recognition that no single person, no single authority or government has a monopoly on the truth, but that every individual life is infinitely precious, that every one of us put in this world has been put there for a reason and has something to offer.

Ronald Reagan

#33. We need to make clear the federal government does not have authority to indefinitely detain U.S. citizens without due process or, for that matter, to use lethal force on U.S. citizens on U.S. soil if they don't pose imminent threats.

Ted Cruz

#34. The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government ...

Eleanor Roosevelt

#35. Perhaps religious conscience upsets the designs of those who feel that the highest wisdom and authority comes from government. But from the beginning, this nation trusted in God, not man. Religious liberty is the first freedom in our Constitution.

Mitt Romney

#36. If it is believed that these elementary schools will be better managed by the governor and council or any other general authority of the government, than by the parents within each ward, it is a belief against all experience.

Thomas Jefferson

#37. The exercise of force is contrary to the principles of God's government; He desires only the service of love; and love cannot be commanded; it cannot be won by force or authority. Only by love is love awakened. To know God is to love Him;

Ellen G. White

#38. In fact, it is because the nature of prayer is so personal and can have such a powerful effect on a community that the government may not use its authority to try to influence an individual's decision whether and when to pray.

Barbara Brandriff Crabb

#39. To bring about government by oligarchy, masquerading as democracy, it is fundamentally essential that practically all authority and control be centralized in our Federal government ... The individual sovereignty of our states must first be destroyed.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

#40. By ensuring that no one in government has too much power, the Constitution helps protect ordinary Americans every day against abuse of power by those in authority.

John Roberts

#41. With a stranglehold of authority it banned the statement for its reproduction or publication in part or in full. The motive on the part of the Government was obvious. It did not want Gandhi to be exposed to the public. The

Anup SarDesai

#42. Between 1776 and 1789, Americans replaced a government over them with a government under them. They have worried ever since about keeping it under. Distrust of its powers has been more common and more visible than distrust of the imperial authority of England ever was before the Revolution.

Edmund Morgan

#43. The License Raj in India was a time when, to set up an industry, you needed a license. Which made the government an omnipresent and sort of all-pervasive authority.

Kumar Mangalam Birla

#44. Jesus , in some respects, was an anarchist, for he had no idea of civil government . That government seems to him purely and simply an abuse. A great social revolution, in which rank will be overturned, in which all authority in this world will be humiliated, was his dream .

Ernest Renan

#45. I firmly believe that the army of persons who urge greater and greater centralization of authority and greater and greater dependence upon the Federal Treasury are really more dangerous to our form of government than any external threat that can possibly be arrayed against us.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

#46. At various times during the last four thousand years God has asserted his rights and endeavoured to establish his own authority, his own laws, and his own government among the children of men.

Orson Pratt

#47. A just government maintains a healthy tension between the claims of authority and the claims of liberty.

Russell Kirk

#48. When justices seize authority from the other branches of the federal government, as well as state and local governments, under the rubric of judicial review, that's tyranny.

Mark Levin

#49. Divide the world into regional groups as a transitional stage to world government. Populations will more readily abandon their national loyalty to a vague regional loyalty than they will for a world authority. Later the regions can be brought together all the way into a single world dictatorship.

Joseph Stalin

#50. The federal government has taken too much tax money from the people, too much authority from the states, and too much liberty with the Constitution.

Ronald Reagan

#51. The Iranian leaders describe the American government exactly the way American analysts describe the Iranian one, as an opaque, factionalized system with competing power centers, over which the president exercises very limited authority.

Ali Khamenei

#52. The federal government began investigating allegations of fraud against the Coalition Provisional Authority, a U.S. contractor accused in a bid-rigging operation involving millions of dollars. Asked to comment, a spokesperson for Halliburton said, 'Millions? With an M? That is adorable.'

Amy Poehler

#53. We do not believe that if you cut back what government does you diminish its authority. On the contrary, a government that did less, and therefore did better, would strengthen its authority.

Margaret Thatcher

#54. It is as disastrous to true government in the state, and home, to teach all womankind to submit to the authority of man, as divinely ordained, as it is to teach all mankind to bow down to the authority of kings and Popes, as divinely ordained.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#55. A leader - whether in the home, church, business, community, or government - has authority due to her role, but her positional power will not bring about good for individuals or organizations unless it is backed up by the capital of character.

Dan B. Allender

#56. If political authority is not limited, the division of powers, ordinarily the guarantee of freedom, becomes a danger and a scourge.

Benjamin Constant

#57. By the end of this decade we will live under the first One World Government that has ever existed in the society of nations ... a government with absolute authority to decide the basic issues of human survival. One world government is inevitable.

Pope John Paul II

#58. I deem no government safe which is under the vassalage of any self-constituted authorities, or any other authority than that of the nation, or its regular functionaries.

Thomas Jefferson

#59. We [the Government] are here not as masters but as servants, we are not here to glory in power, but to attest our loyalty to the commands and restrictions laid down by our sovereign, the people of the United States, in whose name and by whose will we exercise our brief authority.

Charles Evans Hughes

#60. If a shipment of ground beef somehow gets contaminated with pathogens, our federal government does not have authority to recall the beef, only to request that the company issue a recall.

Barbara Kingsolver

#61. Bureaucracies have a natural tendency not to cooperate, coordinate or consolidate with each other. They won't cooperate with each other - unless they are forced to do so by political level authority.

Richard Holbrooke

#62. For which reason I would exhort you to pay all due Regard to the government over us; to the KING and all in authority; and to lead a quiet and peaceable life.

Jonathan Mayhew

#63. The basis of conservatism is a desire for less government interference or less centralized authority or more individual freedom.

Ronald Reagan

#64. The power of creating new funds upon new objects of taxation, by its own authority, would enable the national government to borrow as far as its necessities might require.

Alexander Hamilton

#65. War should only be declared by the authority of the people, whose toils and treasures are to support its burdens, instead of the government which is to reap its fruits.

James Madison

#66. Authority that can not be questioned is tyranny Terry Pratchett: A Slip of the Keyboard

Hank Quense

#67. After four centuries of Spanish rule, Puerto Rico was ceded to the United States in 1898. Residents were granted U.S. citizenship in 1917, and the federal government has allowed Puerto Rico to exercise authority over its local affairs in a manner similar to the 50 states.

Pedro Pierluisi

#68. it will have to overcome a social vision that is by now deeply rooted and powerfully dominant among liberals: the idea that the only genuine liberty is individual liberty, and that the only legitimate authority is the authority of the national government. The

Yuval Levin

#69. I rebelled against all form of authority, against my grandfather, my step-father, the Church, the police, the government, the bosses. Everything male that was there, and was determining my life.

Isabel Allende

#70. [the federal] government [has no authority] to deliver a service, ... and there's no evidence to show that government has ever been efficient [at] delivering ... service.

Ron Paul

#71. A state that privatizes most of its functions will inevitably defend itself by employing its own people as mercenaries

Philip Bobbitt

#72. The international community and Israel have the same opinion regarding the Hamas government. We don't say we are going to boycott it forever. We say the Hamas government must abide by the obligations the Palestinian Authority has signed.

Moshe Katsav

#73. We, the people of South Africa, declare for all our country and the world to know:
That South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white, and that no government can justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of the people.

Nelson Mandela

#74. Pope smiled. "You're thinking all wrong, boy. There's no such thing as law or government inside this room. It's just you and me. I am the one and only authority in your little world, whose borders are these walls. I could kill you right now if I wanted to.

Blake Crouch

#75. It may safely be received as an axiom in our political system, that the state governments will in all possible contingencies afford complete security against invasions of the public liberty by the national authority.

Alexander Hamilton

#76. The right is absolute ... government has no authority to forbid me from owning a firearm ... the debate is not about guns. It is about freedom.

Tom McClintock

#77. The family is the most basic unit of government. As the first community to which a person is attached and the first authority under which a person learns to live, the family establishes society's most basic values.

Charles Caleb Colton

#78. To avoid the necessity of a permanent debt and its inevitable consequences, I have advocated and endeavored to carry into effect the policy of confining the appropriations for the public service to such objects only as are clearly with the constitutional authority of the Federal Government.

Martin Van Buren

#79. If a man exists who is immune to force, even if he's the most blameless anchorite living on top of a column in the middle of the desert, he is beyond government, beyond authority, and cannot be controlled; and that would be intolerable.

K.J. Parker

#80. I have made it quite clear that a unified Ireland was one solution that is out. A second solution was a confederation of two states. That is out. A third solution was joint authority. That is out-that is a derogation of sovereignty.

Margaret Thatcher

#81. [W]e must extend the authority of the Union to the persons of the citizens - the only proper objects of government.

Alexander Hamilton

#82. I think the federal government should be doing only what the Constitution says it should be. We don't have authority under the federal Constitution to have a big federal criminal justice system.

Paul Broun

#83. The instrument by which it [government] must act are either the AUTHORITY of the laws or FORCE. If the first be destroyed, the last must be substituted; and where this becomes the ordinary instrument of government there is an end to liberty!

Alexander Hamilton

#84. Aside from sending someone to war or to prison, government s ability to make people involuntarily give over their money is its strongest exercise of authority over private citizens and their institutions.

William Greider

#85. PRESBYTERIAN, n. One who holds the conviction that the government authorities of the Church should be called presbyters.

Ambrose Bierce

#86. Brent had a love-hate relationship with the Government. He hated what it had become over the years and loved to make an issue about it.

Kenneth Eade

#87. Certainly, no power to prescribe any religious exercise, or to assume authority in religious discipline, has been delegated to the General Government.

Thomas Jefferson

#88. For an American to be patriotic is to be loyal to the principles of our Constitution, and the First Amendment. The truth is that the policies of the government is sometimes in conflict with that. In our country, patriotism should not be defined as obedience to an authority.

Daniel Ellsberg

#89. We set up government by consent of the governed, and the Bill of Rights denies those in power any legal opportunity to coerce that consent. Authority here is to be controlled by public opinion, not public opinion by authority.

Robert H. Jackson

#90. [T]he people as ultimate sovereigns, retain the ultimate power - and even the duty - to overthrow any government that fails to respect their authority.

Glenn Reynolds

#91. Privacy is tremendously important. I believe the American people, and all people, should be skeptical of government power, should ask hard questions: What is the authority? What is the oversight? That's the way it ought to be.

James Comey

#92. The fundamental force behind the Second Amendment is to empower the people and give them the greatest measure of authority over the tyranny of runaway government.

Bob Schaffer

#93. Vox populi vox dei: the voice of the people is the voice of God. The slogan was useful for those who first attempted to substitute the people for God as the source of political authority. Their attempt was ultimately so successful that God no longer seems to be needed in government.

Edmund Morgan

#94. Arizona did not make illegal, illegal. It is a crime to enter or remain in the U.S. in violation of federal law. States have had inherent authority to enforce immigration laws when the federal government has failed or refused to do so.

Russell Pearce

#95. The double-headed eagle that serves the Russian Empire as its crest illustrates quite magnificently the entire system of government of that country, where any matter of even the slightest importance is not entrusted to a single authority but at least two,

Boris Akunin

#96. The disappearance of a sense of responsibility is the most far-reaching consequence of submission to authority.

Stanley Milgram

#97. We need to put people in positions of authority in government, business, law, medicine, media, sports and entertainment who are filled with the laws of God so that we can bring those laws into effect.

Myles Munroe

#98. No government can be maintained without the principle of fear as well as duty.

Jon Meacham

#99. Republican theory clearly stated that the people held all political power, and only they could delegate authority to a government. The people were free to change governments at will. They didn't need permission from incumbents.

James D. Best

#100. The government of a country never gets ahead of the religion of a country. There is no way by which we can substitute the authority of the law for the virtues of men

Calvin Coolidge