Top 100 Powerful Government Quotes
#1. Powerful government tends to draw into it people with bloated egos, people who think they know more than everyone else and have little hesitance in coercing their fellow man. Or as Nobel Laureate Friedrich Hayek said, "in government, the scum rises to the top".
Walter E. Williams
#2. Mr Zhu says what makes him a diaosi is that he is the son of factory workers. He is not fu er dai - second-generation rich - or guan er dai - the son of powerful government officials (it does not escape a diaosi's notice that those two categories often overlap).
Anonymous
#3. The United States has the most powerful government, with the longest reach, of any nation in history. It is also the Brokest Nation in History. Resolving that contradiction is unlikely to be pretty.
Mark Steyn
#4. We live in a time when to reject the idea of an all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful government is to be viewed by that government as being anti-government.
Dave Champion
#5. No matter how big and powerful government gets, and the many services it provides, it can never take the place of volunteers.
Ronald Reagan
#6. America is the most creative country and the most powerful government in the world.
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi
#7. Fear is the State's psychological weapon of choice to frighten citizens into sacrificing their basic freedoms and rule-of-law protections in exchange for the security promised by their all-powerful government.
Philip G. Zimbardo
#8. Big Brother in the form of an increasingly powerful government and in an increasingly powerful private sector will pile the records high with reasons why privacy should give way to national security, to law and order [ ... ] and the like.
William O. Douglas
#9. And, not only in Budapest. I worked very closely with a very powerful government organization, which shall remain unidentified, to develop the mass marketed version of the Cube.
Erno Rubik
#10. They need to review this secret world. We have an incredibly powerful government that gets on automatic pilot.
Bob Woodward
#11. The more powerful government becomes, the more abuses it commits and the more lies it must tell.
James Bovard
#12. There's the idea that people should be able to control how the information that they're giving to websites is used and monetized in a more clear and powerful way. That's something that probably will need government action.
Eli Pariser
#13. The most powerful recent innovation in government is when states aggressively use community colleges for retraining. In Michigan, where large numbers of workers were displaced from the manufacturing industry, we created a wildly successful program: No Worker Left Behind.
Jennifer Granholm
#14. A lot of people are deeply dissatisfied by the diminishing control they have over their lives, because of the way our system of government is set up, to cater to the powerful, cater to the wealthy, cater to the corporations, and not to the individual American citizen.
Josh Fox
#15. States are violent institutions. The government of any country, including ours, represents some sort of domestic power structure, and it's usually violent. States are violent to the extent that they're powerful, that's roughly accurate.
Noam Chomsky
#16. We do not run government on whims of an individual, our progress is reforms driven, our reforms are policy driven and our policies are people driven.
Narendra Modi
#17. And the God who ruled absolutely in the life and fortunes of the most powerful monarch of that time still rules in the fortunes and destinies of governments today. No government or dictator is so powerful as to be beyond the sway of His sovereign rule over all the nations of the earth. GOD
Jerry Bridges
#18. No centralized government, no matter how big, how smart or how powerful, can effectively and efficiently control much of society in a beneficial way. On the contrary, big governments are inherently inefficient and harmful.
Charles Koch
#19. When a government becomes powerful it is destructive, extravagant and violent; it is an usurer which takes bread from innocent mouths and deprives honorable men of their substance, for votes with which to perpetuate itself.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#20. As our federal government has grown too large and too powerful, the real loss has been the freedom of people to govern their own lives and participate fully in the American dream.
Steve Forbes
#22. The most powerful force possessed by the individual citizen is her own government ... Government is the only organized mechanism that makes possible that level of shared disinterest known as the public good.
John Ralston Saul
#23. An order of government, established by such an all-wise, powerful being, must be good and perfect, and must be calculated to promote the permanent peace, happiness, and well-being of all his subjects.
Orson Pratt
#24. The truth shall set you free...unless of course you live anywhere w/vengeful, powerful people and/or government - John: First Draft
Grea Alexander
#25. of the time, inertia is the most powerful force in government. Those who seek change have to succeed at dozens of potential veto points. Those who seek to prevent change usually have to succeed at only one.
Brendan Williams
#26. A government that trusts its people is powerful only if the people also trust their government. A government that does not trust its people is only powerful if it knows exactly what everyone is doing at all times.
Chris Dietzel
#27. As government regulations grow slowly, we become used to the harness. Habit is a powerful force, and we no longer feel as intensely as we once would have [the] constriction of our liberties that would have been utterly intolerable a mere half century ago.
Robert Bork
#28. The UN is but a long-range, international banking apparatus clearly set up for financial and economic profit by a small group of powerful One-World revolutionaries, hungry for profit and power.
Curtis Bean Dall
#29. Agribusiness - with its wicked powerful lobby and its infiltration of top bureaucratic posts - essentially runs roughshod over the government agencies that are supposed to monitor it. It's the rich fox guarding the filthy, overcrowded henhouse.
Jane Velez-Mitchell
#30. When the vision of the U.S. government included guarding the rights of people but staying out of their way, America was an economic engine more powerful than anything the world had ever witnessed.
Ben Carson
#31. The most powerful entities on earth are not governments but the multi-national corporations that see women as their territory, indoctrinating them with their versions of beauty, health and hygiene, medicating them and cultivating their dependency in order to medicate them some more.
Germaine Greer
#32. The point of taxation isn't that the government knows better than you how to spend your money - it's that the government, by virtue of being the government, can spend money in ways that no private citizen or group no matter how powerful, can.
Jesse Taylor
#33. For 70 years there's been a consensus among scholars and the American people on a reading to the Constitution that protects the right of privacy, the autonomy of individuals, while at the same time empowering the federal government to protect the less powerful.
Joe Biden
#34. Keeping a lid on taxes is not just good for the taxpayer. It's a powerful way to force government to be more accountable, set priorities and spend smarter. Let me repeat that: more accountable, set priorities and spend smarter - that's what we need to be about.
Tim Pawlenty
#35. The future is not Big Government. Self-serving politicians. Powerful bureaucrats. This has been tried, tested throughout history. The result has always been disaster. President Obama, your agenda is not new. It's not change, and it's not hope.
Rush Limbaugh
#36. I think, in the longer view of things, there is a very powerful pull in the direction of participatory government.
Paul Wolfowitz
#37. If left unattended by nonvigilant citizens, the freedoms of democracy can be lost to an all-powerful state, and citizens can become transformed into subjects of the government they failed to keep in check.
Christine Barbour
#38. There are very powerful and wealthy special interests who want to privatize or dismember virtually every function that government now performs, whether it is Social Security, Medicare, public education or the Postal Service.
Bernie Sanders
#39. Government not just for a few, it belongs to the common people.
Narendra Modi
#40. Encryption ... is a powerful defensive weapon for free people. It offers a technical guarantee of privacy, regardless of who is running the government ... It's hard to think of a more powerful, less dangerous tool for liberty.
Esther Dyson
#41. Despotism has forever had a powerful hold upon the world. Autocratic government, not self-government, has been the prevailing state of mankind. The record of past history is the record, not of the success of republics, but of their failure.
Calvin Coolidge
#42. By adopting programs to distribute substantial amounts of income, a nation guarantees that its government will become more powerful and invasive in other ways.
Robert Higgs
#43. In historical messianism, the reign of the Messiah is brought about by a Jewish ruler powerful enough to gather the Jewish exiles back to the land of Israel, reestablish a Torah government there, and rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem.
David Novak
#44. I believe we are slowly turning into a socialist government. The government is continually growing bigger and more powerful and the people need to prepare to defend themselves against government control.
Timothy McVeigh
#45. Sometimes there are leftwing governments I'm very critical of. For me, being leftwing is to live in a society where there's permanent change. It also means to respect the freedom of everybody, and to not accept big organizations or rich, powerful people holding power.
Costa-Gavras
#46. A government is one that thinks and hears the voice of the poor. A government must live for the poor.
Narendra Modi
#47. As the excited passions of hostile people are of themselves a powerful enemy, both the general and his government should use their best efforts to allay them.
Antoine-Henri Jomini
#48. 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
#49. And those rights are not to be lightly infringed upon by government in any way. They're explicitly protected by the Constitution from the government. We are, after all, fragile living things that can be suppressed and abused by the powerful.
Thom Hartmann
#50. You can't write novels without a touch of paranoia. I'm paranoid as an act of good citizenship, concerned about what the powerful people are up to.
Kurt Vonnegut
#51. The founders had a strong distrust for centralized power in a federal government. So they created a government with checks and balances. This was to prevent any branch of the government from becoming too powerful.
Ezra Taft Benson
#52. Keep a government poor and weak and it's your servant; let it get rich and powerful and it's your master.
H. Beam Piper
#53. The greatest danger to liberty today comes from the men who are most needed and most powerful in modern government, namely, the efficient expert administrators exclusively concerned with what they regard as the public good.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#54. The government never minds having more power, and is always prepared to paper over the problems it creates. An economy not bludgeoned by powerful elites is the ideal we should seek, even if it has a name that is wildly unpopular: capitalism
Jeffrey Tucker
#55. One can see [ ... ] that the so-called governing powers are cardboard characters that mask the true ruling factors of our culture. Of course, those who manipulate the nation are not stupid. Rulers throughout history are only as powerful as the people who support them allow them to be.
Peter Moon
#56. There's nothing more powerful than someone who has the disease who can be articulate and go in front of Congress or go to local government and say man, this is what's happening, and it's going to be you.
David Hyde Pierce
#57. Free government is the most difficult of all government. But it is everlastingly true that the plain people will make fewer mistakes than any other group of men, no matter how powerful.
Herbert Hoover
#58. Bush violated FISA [ ... ] because he wanted to violate the law in order to establish the general 'principle' that he was not bound by the law, to show that he has the power to break the law, that he is more powerful than the law.
Glenn Greenwald
#59. As Americans we must always remember that we all have a common enemy, an enemy that is dangerous, powerful, and relentless. I refer, of course, to the federal government.
Dave Barry
#60. Change is not in the hands of government, not in the hands of a leader or guru, and not in the hands of the powerful or wealthy. It is in our hands: the hands of each and every one of us.
Shari Arison
#61. What patient can trust the knowledge of a physician without reputation or furniture, in a period when publicity is all-powerful and when the government gilds the lamp posts on the Place de la Concorde in order to dazzle the poor?
Honore De Balzac
#62. I run a taxpayer group - the most powerful guy in D.C., nonsense. OK? There are buildings with thousands of people in them, all lobbying for more spending and higher levels of spending and more government commitments. And there are a handful - a handful of groups that fight for less spending.
Grover Norquist
#63. The corporations are powerful only because we have allowed them to be. In theory, it is we, not they, who mandate the state. But we have neglected our duty of citizenship, and they have taken advantage of our neglect to seize the reins of government.
George Monbiot
#64. I'm a field Negro. The masses are the field Negroes. When they see this man's house on fire, you don't hear these little Negroes talking about 'our government is in trouble'. They say, 'The government is in trouble.'
Malcolm X
#65. Experience assures us, that the efficacy of the provision has been greatly over-rated; and that some more adequate defense is indispensably necessary for the more feeble, against the more powerful members of the government.
James Madison
#66. The most important external environment is the government of India. You have to sell your ideas to the government. Selling the idea is the most important thing, and for that I'll meet anybody in the government. I am willing to salaam anyone. One thing you won't find in me and that is an ego.
Dhirubhai Ambani
#67. When Chinese people want liberal reforms, they are delivered. When they want more Communism and an epic fight against corruption, like now, China's government immediately reacts. It is powerful and democratic, although a very specific and complex arrangement.
Andre Vltchek
#68. Business itself is now the most powerful force for change in the world today, richer and faster by far than most governments. And what is it doing with this power? It is using free trade, the most powerful weapon at its disposal, to tighten its grip on the globe.
Anita Roddick
#69. Republicans say they don't believe in government. Sure they do. They believe in government to help themselves and their powerful friends.
Elizabeth Warren
#70. There is no transparency, Marus. It can't exist. Surveillance doesn't go both ways. There are those who watch, and those who are watched; the powerful, and the powerless.
Celeste Chaney
#71. These international bankers and Rockefeller Standard Oil interests control the majority of newspapers and the columns of these papers to club into submission or drive out of public office officials who refuse to do the bidding of the powerful corrupt cliques which compose the invisible government.
Theodore Roosevelt
#72. We are entering an era in which national government, instead of directing, enables powerful regional and local initiatives to work, where Britain becomes as it should be - a Britain of nations and regions
Gordon Brown
#73. The uniform, constant, and uninterrupted effort of every man to better his condition ... is frequently powerful enough to maintain the natural progress of things toward improvement, in spite of the extravagance of government, and of the greatest errors of administration.
Adam Smith
#74. There is thus little or no ability for an internet user to know when they are being covertly propagandized by their government, which is precisely what makes it so appealing to intelligence agencies, so powerful, and so dangerous.
Glenn Greenwald
#75. 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
#76. Let's face it: we live at a time when government is less and less powerful, less and less effective, and the agent of social change, at least for the immediate future, is the corporation.
Tibor Kalman
#77. I want my son to grow up in a place where the people are more powerful than the government and not the other way around.
Tony Blair
#78. The truth is, Hillary Clinton's ideas create more income inequality. Why? Because bigger government creates crony capitalism. When you have a 70,000 page tax code, you've got to be very wealthy, very powerful, very well connected to dig your way through that tax code.
Carly Fiorina
#79. Museums are western inventions where the rich and the powerful or the government and the state tend to exhibit the signs and symbol and images of their culture.
Orhan Pamuk
#80. In reality, government subsidized railroad construction, maintained high protective tariffs and a tight money supply, used its power to crush strikes, and in other ways supported the nation's most powerful economic interests. But the laissez-faire myth still framed political debate. The
Steven J. Diner
#81. I think when you've been exposed to the Creator of the universe, then the federal government doesn't seem very powerful.
Steve Largent
#82. You are not to inquire how your trade may be increased, nor how you are to become a great and powerful people, but how your liberties can be secured; for liberty ought to be the direct end of your government.
Patrick Henry
#83. One of the things I think I can bring to the presidency is to make government and public service cool again.
Barack Obama
#84. James Madison made clear in Federalist 51 that that this elaborate structure - today often derided as " gridlock " - was created to protect individual freedom against oppression by the majority or by powerful interest groups who exploit government power for their own purposes.
Anonymous
#85. You must remember that you are called to save and set others free, to raise and develop strong and powerful leaders, who will form the government of the nations for Christ
Sunday Adelaja
#86. She still remembers the effect a certain book can have on people at the right time in their lives. A book, at its most mundane,can be a loaded gun. At its most powerful, it can split the trunk of a tree, mend a broken heart, heal the sick, and topple a corrupt government.
Don Borchert
#87. Crony capitalism is alive and well: the big are bigger, the wealthy are getting wealthier because, with a very large powerful complicated government, which is what we have and which Democrats want more of, only the big, the powerful, the wealthy and the well connected can survive.
Carly Fiorina
#88. 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
#89. Wall Street is perhaps the most powerful economic and political force in this country. You have companies like Goldman Sachs, who just recently paid a settlement fine with the federal government for $5 billion for defrauding investors.
Bernie Sanders
#90. The test of a government is not how popular it is with the powerful and privileged few but how honestly and fairly it deals with the many who must depend on it.
Jimmy Carter
#92. The government of the world's most powerful nation is running furiously in place.
Ron Suskind
#93. The responsibility of philanthropy rests with us. The wealthier we are, the more powerful we get. We cannot put the entire onus on the government.
Azim Premji
#94. A smaller government reflecting the needs of the middle class and poor is superior to a big government reflecting the needs of the privileged and powerful.
Robert B. Reich
#95. Every power-seeking entity in the world, whether it's a government, a business, or an informal group, has gotten wise to the idea that if you can assemble information about other people, that information makes you powerful.
Jaron Lanier
#96. The government in Turkey, which represents the powerful, traditionalist mass, is very comfortable creating policies tailored only for their supporters.
Safak Pavey
#97. History will judge societies and governments - and their institutions - not by how big they are or how well they serve the rich and the powerful, but by how effectively they respond to the needs of the poor and the helpless.
Cesar Chavez
#98. This is a powerful message from our government: we will not be intimidated by bombs; we will not be intimidated by poison; this is America, if you're a violent, paranoid lunatic, you must use a gun!
Bill Maher
#99. Fletcher Von Pein was one of the twelve founders of the Omega Agency. He was also a powerful banker and a majority shareholder in the US Federal Reserve which, despite its misleading name, had zero government ownership and was actually a private corporation owned by the global elite.
James Morcan
#100. We fought for freedom together. We had no government, no weapons to help us. We defeated such a big empire without any government, without any arms.
Narendra Modi
