Top 100 Power Of Government Quotes
#1. It is necessary to curb the power of government. This is the task of all constitutions, bills of rights and laws. This is the meaning of all struggles which men have fought for liberty.
Ludwig Von Mises
#2. The number of illegal activities were so large that one was bound to come out and lead to the uncovering of the others. Nixon was too willing to use the power of government to settle scores and get even with enemies.
Bob Woodward
#3. When the coercive power of government is used to equalize incomes, it guarantees less prosperity across the board and spreads the misery, which is one of the many reasons Marxism and socialism have failed everywhere they've tried.
David Limbaugh
#4. When you are subverting the power of government, that's a fundamentally dangerous thing to democracy.
Edward Snowden
#5. Before a community can prosper, the people must believe in their leaders. They must know that at the core of every decision is careful planning, hard work, and unbending integrity rather than partisanship or self-gain. They must trust that the awesome power of government is not being abused.
Linda Lingle
#6. The coercive power of government is always a beacon to those who want to dominate others
summoning the worst dregs of society to Washington to use that power to impose their will upon others.
Harry Browne
#7. Unfortunately, it is not in the power of government to make everyone more prosperous. Government can only raise the income of one person by taking from another.
Hans F. Sennholz
#8. The history of liberty is the history of limitations on the power of government, not the increase of it. When we resist, therefore, the concentration of power, we are resisting the processes of death, because concentration of power is what always precedes the destruction of human liberties.
Woodrow Wilson
#9. No power of government ought to be employed in the endeavor to establish any system or article of belief on the subject of religion.
Jeremy Bentham
#10. We have staked the whole future of our new nation, not upon the power of government; far from it. We have staked the future of all our political constitutions upon the capacity of each of ourselves to govern ourselves according to the moral principles of the Ten Commandments.
James Madison
#11. We urge all people to recognize that religious freedom requires not trying to use the power of government to force religious ideas on others.
Ed Buckner
#12. It is no accident, then, that each of our major wars has served to enhance the power of government in Washington: the Civil War, World Wars I and II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Edward S. Greenberg
#13. Tyrannies have long lists of rights. What they do not have is structural restraints on the power of government.
Antonin Scalia
#14. The most unresolved problem of the day is precisely the problem that concerned the founders of this nation: how to limit the scope and power of government. Tyranny, restrictions on human freedom, come primarily from governmental restrictions that we ourselves have set up.
Milton Friedman
#15. The greatest political problem facing the world today is ... how to curb the oppressive power of government, how to keep it within reasonable bounds.
Leonard Read
#16. When the Statist makes a wrong decision, its impact is far-reaching, for he uses the power of government to impose his decision on as many individuals and businesses as possible, which distorts the free market itself.
Mark Levin
#17. How can those who are invested with the power of government be prevented from the abuse of those powers as the means of aggrandizing themselves? ... Without a strong constitution to counteract the strong tendency of government to disorder and abuse there can be little progress or improvement.
John C. Calhoun
#18. History makes the point time and time again No greater mischief can be created than to merge the power of religion with the power of government.
Lowell P. Weicker Jr.
#19. The Obamacare contraception mandate was never about freedom. It was always about pitting secularism against religion, and using the power of government to sponsor secularism.
Ben Shapiro
#20. What the political left, even in democratic countries, share is the notion that knowledgeable and virtuous people like themselves have both a right and a duty to use the power of government to impose their superior knowledge and virtue on others.
Thomas Sowell
#21. What is called "planning" in political rhetoric is the government's suppression of other people's plans by superimposing on them a collective plan, created by third parties, armed with the power of government and exempted from paying the costs that these collective plans impose on others.
Thomas Sowell
#22. The rich will strive to establish their dominion and enslave the rest. They
always did ... they always will. They will have the same effect here as
elsewhere, if we do not, by the power of government, keep them in their proper
spheres.
Gouverneur Morris
#23. The Third Way is simply a different route to the same destination. Ultimately, the choice is always between individual human liberty and the power of government to control our lives.
Ed Crane
#24. We can have no sympathy with those who seek the power of government to advance their own personal interests or ambitions.
Woodrow Wilson
#25. Government of limited power need not be anemic government. Assurance that rights are secure tends to diminish fear and jealousy of strong government, and by making us feel safe to live under it makes for its better support.
Robert H. Jackson
#26. Until you realize how easily it is for your mind to be manipulated, you remain the puppet of someone else's game.
Evita Ochel
#27. Let us never forget that government is ourselves and not an alien power over us. The ultimate rulers of our democracy are not a President and senators and congressmen and government officials, but the voters of this country.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#28. All governments needed to remain under suspicion during their time of power including that of the Sisterhood itself. Trust no government! Not even mine!
Frank Herbert
#29. Here's the dirty little secret: Fiat currency is designed to lose value. Its very purpose is to confiscate your wealth and transfer it to the government. Each time the government prints a new dollar and spends it, the government gets the full purchasing power of that dollar.
Michael Maloney
#30. The government that came into power after the April 1994 elections was going to need a budget. It was drafted by our finance minister, Derek Keys, and he convinced them of the necessity to stay within the free-market principles that had been in force in South Africa for decades.
F. W. De Klerk
#31. We know that this nation entered into solemn treaties [with Indian tribes] which have been continuously violated for more than 250 years. It's a disgrace. It's an outrage. We must do everything in our power to keep those treaties. Otherwise, the word of the United States government is no good.
John McCain
#32. I am a mortal enemy to arbitrary government and unlimited power. I am naturally very jealous for the rights and liberties of my country, and the least encroachment of those invaluable privileges is apt to make my blood boil.
Benjamin Franklin
#33. Government mitigates the inequality of power, and makes an innocent man, though of the lowest rank, a match for the mightiest of his fellow-subjects.
Joseph Addison
#34. American nuclear weapons would almost certainly start being removed from Britain within 12 months of a Labour government gaining power.
Neil Kinnock
#35. The idea that each corporation can be a feudal monarchy and yet behave in its corporate action like a democratic citizen concerned for the world we live in is one of the great absurdities of our time -
Kim Stanley Robinson
#36. Where a government has come into power through some form of popular vote, fraudulent or not, and maintains at least an appearance of constitutional legality, the guerrilla outbreak cannot be promoted, since the possibilities of peaceful struggle have not yet been exhausted.
Che Guevara
#37. Terrorists can endanger some of us, but the war on terror endangers us all. How much more can the Constitution be diminished before it is completely replaced by arbitrary government power?
Paul Craig Roberts
#38. This great oracle of the East India Company himself admits that, if there is no power vested in the Court of Directors but that of the patronage, there is really no government vested in them at all.
Richard Cobden
#39. There can be no greater stretch of arbitrary power than to seize children from their parents, teach them whatever the authorities decree they shall be taught, and expropriate from the parents the funds to pay for the procedure.
Isabel Paterson
#40. It is an ambassador's duty to stand up for his nation's foreign policy in any era and under any government whatsoever. Ambassadors are, in the full meaning of the term, titled spies.
Napoleon Bonaparte
#41. The danger to a free society is not the guns owned by the citizens but an unconstrained government ... An armed society is a self-governing society, just as a disarmed people are vulnerable to arbitrary power of every kind.
Llewellyn Rockwell
#42. A power has risen up in the government greater than the people themselves, consisting of many and various and powerful interests, combined into one mass, and held together by the cohesive power of the vast surplus in the banks.
John C. Calhoun
#43. Deregulation is a transfer of power from the trodden to the treading. It is unsurprising that all conservative parties claim to hate big government.
George Monbiot
#44. If there are such things as political axioms, the propriety of the judicial power of a government being co-extensive with its legislative, may be ranked among the number.
Alexander Hamilton
#45. Government is truly beginning to embrace the power of innovation for the people and by the people, the idea that if government collaborates openly with and unleashes the ingenuity of the public, it will get much more done, much faster and at much lower cost than if government acted alone.
Todd Park
#47. If we want a healthy economy, we need the issuing of money to return to the government and not to be a power of private banks. We need money backed by real valuable goods, not pieces of paper that must be paid back at interest. Money is supposed to benefit humanity, not make us its servant.
Joseph P. Kauffman
#48. The arbitrary power of the Government is unlimited, and unexampled in history; freedom of the Press, of opinion and of movement are as thoroughly exterminated as though the proclamation of the Rights of Man had never been.
Arthur Koestler
#49. We wait here to meet the Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam to discuss together a ceremony of orderly transfer of power so as to avoid any unnecessary bloodshed in the population.
Duong Van Minh
#50. There is a long American tradition of suspicion of concentrated economic power because of its tendency to corrupt government and turn it from a democracy into a plutocracy.
Zephyr Teachout
#51. All branches of our government today are controlled by individuals who use their power to undermine liberty and enhance the welfare/warfare state-and frequently their own wealth and power,
Ron Paul
#52. Even the most despotic government cannot stand except for the consent of the governed ... Immediately the subject ceases to fear the despotic force, his power is gone.
Mahatma Gandhi
#53. Of course, a law that is selectively used is in one aspect even worse than a law that is generally used because it puts a lot of power in individuals' hands and makes government a rule, not of laws, but of people.
Vikram Seth
#54. Fairness' is one of the great mantras of the left. Since everyone has his own definition of fairness, that word is a blank check for the expansion of government power. What fairness means in practice is that third parties
busybodies
can prevent mutual accommodations by others.
Thomas Sowell
#55. If increased government spending with borrowed or newly created money is a 'stimulus,' then the Weimar Republic should have been stimulated to unprecedented prosperity, instead of runaway inflation and widespread economic desperation that ultimately brought Adolf Hitler to power.
Thomas Sowell
#56. I say, that Power must never be trusted without a check.
John Adams
#57. Government has no right to control individual liberty beyond what is necessary to the safety and well-being of society. Such is the boundary which separates the power of the government and the liberty of the citizen or subject in the political state.
John C. Calhoun
#58. What the world needs is a small, compact, flexible fusion technology that could make electricity where and when it is needed. The existing fusion program is leading to a huge source of centralized power, at a price that nobody except a government can afford.
Freeman Dyson
#59. Printing money is merely taxation in another form. Rather than robbing citizens of their money, government robs their money of its purchasing power.
Peter Schiff
#60. Because of the power that we have given money: The government would rather have taxpayers who do not vote, than voters who do not pay tax.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
#61. There can be no such thing as "limited government," because there is no way to control an entity that in principle enjoys a monopoly of power ...
Joseph Sobran
#62. The [EU] Council of Ministers will have far more power over the budgets of member states than the federal government in the United States has over the budget of Texas.
Jean-Claude Trichet
#63. In every country except - industrial country except the United States, the government uses its massive purchasing power to negotiate drug prices. That's one of the reasons prices are so much higher in the United States than in other countries.
Noam Chomsky
#64. So bitcoin gives us an opportunity to reclaim the power of the people to say yes or no to what the government claims that it wants to do.
Stefan Molyneux
#65. Literature is not at the service of the government; on the contrary, governments should do everything in their power to create a favourable climate for literature.
Murong Xuecun
#66. The threat to change Senate rules is a raw abuse of power and will destroy the very checks and balances our founding fathers put in place to prevent absolute power by any one branch of government,
Harry Reid
#67. 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
#68. The problem is we have a Wall Street-to-Washington access of power that has controlled the political climate. The donor class feeds the political class who does the dance that the donor class wants. And the result is federal government keeps getting bigger.
Mike Huckabee
#69. An enlightened zeal for the energy and efficiency of government will be stigmatized, as the offspring of a temper fond of despotic power, and hostile to the principles of liberty.
Alexander Hamilton
#70. She [Justice sandra Day O'Connor] rejected the [George] Bush administration's claim that it could indefinitely detain a United States citizen. She upheld the fundamental principle of judicial review over the exercise of government power.
Patrick Leahy
#71. Liberals have shifted government into a position of being neutral between right and wrong. By concentrating power in government institutions, liberals chisel at the three pillars of society: the family unit, work ethic and faith. That's not good for America.
James G. Watt
#72. Strength we think to be a virtue in government, but we do not find our defense against disintegration either in arbitrary or in very great power. Indeed, we are inclined to see in both these the symptoms of an already advanced decay
Michael Oakeshott
#73. The smaller the number and the more permanent and conspicuous the station of men in power, the stronger must be the interest which they will individually feel in whatever concerns the government.
James Madison
#74. The very idea of the power and the right of the people to establish government presupposes the duty of every individual to obey the established government.
George Washington
#75. Very few people realize that the U.S. government does not have the power to order the recall of contaminated meat.
Eric Schlosser
#76. The debate over judicial nominations is a debate over the judiciary itself. It is a debate over how much power unelected judges should have in our system of government, how much control judges should have over a written constitution that belongs to the people.
Orrin Hatch
#77. 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
#78. There is all of this protesting against corporate power, but in reality, corporations have to persuade you - they could have a ton of money, but actually only government can use force.
John Stossel
#79. Not in government or force, not in slavery or war, but in the creative, and thereby spiritual, power of freedom, shall our inspiration be found.
F. A. Harper
#80. But are we to accept a form of government which we do not entirely approve of, merely in hopes that it will be administered well? Does not every man know, that nothing is more liable to be abused than power. Power, without a check, in any hands, is tyranny;
Bernard Bailyn
#81. The mania for giving the Government power to meddle with the private affairs of cities or citizens is likely to cause endless trouble.
Mark Twain
#82. I will protect your tax money! It won't be spent on Prime Minister and Governor houses. InshALLAH the day PTI government comes in power these walls of governor houses will be brought down. We will break these walls and make libraries and playgrounds for the public to use
Imran Khan
#83. The women of the country have the power in their own hands, in spite of the law and the government being altogether of the male order.
Victoria Woodhull
#84. As individuals, as families, as neighbors, as members of one community, people of all races and political views are usually decent, kind, compassionate. But in large corporations or governments, when great power accumulates in their hands, some become monsters even with good intentions.
Dean Koontz
#85. Gold and silver are always in demand, regardless of clime, century, or government in power. But public confidence in and, hence, demand for paper money depends on the ultimate confidence - or lack thereof - of the public in the viability of the issuing government.
Murray Rothbard
#86. Large corporations and governments do not seem to understand this rebound power of information and its ability to control those who try to control it. When you hear a corporation or a debt-laden government trying to "reinstill confidence" you know they are fragile, hence doomed.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#87. A government of five hundred country attornies and obscure curates is not good for twenty-four millions of men, though it were chosen by eight and forty millions; nor is it the better for being guided by a dozen of persons of quality, who have betrayed their trust in order to obtain that power.
Edmund Burke
#88. On my honor, I swear to you, that from my first day in office to the last breath I draw, I will do everything in my power to make you proud of your government.
John McCain
#89. The freedom of a government does not depend on the quality of its laws, but upon the power that has the right to create them.
Thaddeus Stevens
#90. The people are the source of governmental power. Along with many religious people, Latter-day Saints affirm that God gave the power to the people, and the people consented to a constitution that delegated certain powers to the government ... The sovereign power is in the people.
Dallin H. Oaks
#91. The only limit to the oppression of government is the power with which the people show themselves capable of opposing it.
Errico Malatesta
#92. What better way for a ruling class to claim and hold power than to pose as the defenders of the nation.
Christopher Hitchens
#93. No government knows any limits to its power except the endurance of the people.
Lysander Spooner
#94. The control of information is something the elite always does, particularly in a despotic form of government. Information, knowledge, is power. If you can control information, you can control people.
Tom Clancy
#95. The States should be urged to concede to the General Government, with a saving of chartered rights, the exclusive power of establishing banks of discount for paper.
Thomas Jefferson
#96. The President of the Universe holds no real power. His sole purpose is to take attention away from where the power truly exists ...
Douglas Adams
#97. I think I shall return to America even a better patriot than when I left it. A citizen of the United States, travelling on the continent of Europe, finds the contrast between a government of power and a government of opinion forced upon him at every step.
William Cullen Bryant
#98. Throughout history, when societies face tough economic times, we have seen democratic reforms deferred, decreased trust in government, persecution of minority groups, and a general shrinking of the democratic space.
Samantha Power
#99. Economic power is exercised by means of a positive, by offering men a reward, an incentive, a payment, a value; political power is exercised by means of a negative, by the threat of punishment, injury, imprisonment, destruction. The businessman's tool is values; the bureaucrat's tool is fear.
Ayn Rand
#100. If we add state capitalism to the Bush administration's success in eroding both the US Constitution and the power of Congress, we may be witnessing the final death of accountable constitutional government.
Paul Craig Roberts
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