Quotes About Government Power

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. Nothing for the Left, nothing the government does is ever about its superficial reason; it's only and always about expanding government power and control over you.

Monica Crowley

#6. The more people expect from government, the more biased they become against limiting government power.

James Bovard

#7. Fascism should rightly be called corporatism, as it is the merger of corporate and government power.

Benito Mussolini

#8. Political scientists almost everywhere have promoted the expansion of government power. They have functioned as the clergy of oppression.

Rudolph Rummel

#9. Well, first of all, I think that a lot of the voters who are voting for the tea party candidates have really good impulses. That is, they believe that for years and years and years, the people with wealth and power or government power have done well and ordinary people have not. That's true.

William J. Clinton

#10. The story of liberty is a history of the limitation of a government power, not the increase of it.

William J. Federer

#11. Our Constitution, which was intended to limit government power and abuse, has failed,

Ron Paul

#12. No one can read our Constitution without concluding that the people who wrote it wanted their government severely limited; the words "no" and "not" employed in restraint of government power occur 24 times in the first seven articles of the Constitution and 22 more times in the Bill of Rights.

Edmund A. Opitz

#13. Let us not rush into a vast expansion of government power in a misguided attempt to protect freedom. In doing so, we will inevitably erode the very freedom we seek to protect.

Bob Barr

#14. 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

#15. I believe that Americans should be deeply skeptical of government power. You cannot trust people in power. The founders knew that. That's why they divided power among three branches, to set interest against interest.

James Comey

#16. No government power can be abused long. Mankind will not bear it ... There is a remedy in human nature against tyranny, that will keep us safe under every form of government.

Samuel Johnson

#17. It is from weakness that people reach for dictators and concentrated government power. Only the strong can be free. And only the productive can be strong.

Wendell Willkie

#18. As a conservative who believes in limited government, I believe that the only check on government power in real time is a free and independent press.

Mike Pence

#19. 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

#20. The object and practice of liberty lies in the limitation of government power.

Douglas MacArthur

#21. Government power is always abused by seizing and perverting the law. And with few exceptions, government always determines what is law.

John Galt

#22. Democrats want to use government power to make people's lives go better; Republicans respond that people know more than politicians do. We think that both might be able to agree that nudging can maintain free markets, and liberty, while also inclining people in good directions.

Cass Sunstein

#23. If the government controls your health care, the government controls you. Obamacare was never about health care. It was about government power, dependency, and control.

Monica Crowley

#24. Second, and in the same breath, constitutions seek to discipline politics and to limit government power.

Michael S. Greve

#25. Obama's defiantly vowed not only to radically expand the reach of government from cradle to grave, but to smash the Constitution's restrictions on government power while doing it.

Steve Stockman

#26. What if the new political spectrum has on one side those people who want to be left alone, those who want to be free, those who don't hurt people or take their stuff, and on the other extreme of this new scale stands anyone who wants to use government power to tell you how to live your life?

Matt Kibbe

#27. Arbitrary government power is being multiplied daily by the now practically unchallenged assumption that wherever there is any problem of any kind to be solved, government is the agency to step in and solve it.

Henry Hazlitt

#28. Wise men wrote the Constitution, but clever judges have been destroying it, bit by bit, turning it into an instrument of arbitrary judicial power, instead of a limitation on all government power.

Thomas Sowell

#29. People with an investment in government power will torture logic like a medieval inquisitor rather than face the facts ... There's a simple way to keep money out of politics: Keep politics out of our money.

Sheldon Richman

#30. Technologies like PayPal foster competition because they enable people to shift their funds from one jurisdiction to another, and I think that ultimately will lead to a world in which there's less government power and therefore more individual control.

Peter Thiel

#31. Without the ability to talk about government power, there's no way for citizens to make sure this power isn't being misused.

Aaron Swartz

#32. Once a person becomes a government dependent, his moral standing to resist the expansion of government power is fatally compromised.

James Bovard

#33. [D]emocracy can itself be as tyrannical as a dictatorship, since it is the extent, not the source, of government power that impinges on freedom.
-William F Buckley

William F. Buckley Jr.

#34. Reforming is about curbing government power. It is a self-imposed revolution; it will require real sacrifice, and it will be painful.

Li Keqiang

#35. 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

#36. Until you realize how easily it is for your mind to be manipulated, you remain the puppet of someone else's game.

Evita Ochel

#37. 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

#38. 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

#39. 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

#40. 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

#41. 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

#42. 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

#43. 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

#44. 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

#45. American nuclear weapons would almost certainly start being removed from Britain within 12 months of a Labour government gaining power.

Neil Kinnock

#46. It was easy to share when there was enough, even barely enough, to go round. But when there was not enough? Then force entered in; might making right; power, and its tool, violence, and its most devoted ally, the averted eye.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#47. When you give government the power to control the money supply, it grows like a tumor until it extinguishes society itself.

Stefan Molyneux

#48. 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

#49. 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

#50. The only way to make a difference is to acquire power.

Hillary Rodham Clinton

#51. Smaller government, more individual responsibility, more individual control creates more Republicans. More state power and ownership and control and top-down decision-making creates more Democrats.

Grover Norquist

#52. 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

#53. 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

#54. 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

#55. 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

#56. There should be a law that you can't shut down the government - that you don't have that power.

Lewis Black

#57. 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

#58. 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

#59. Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.

P. J. O'Rourke

#60. 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

#61. 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

#62. Governments derive their just power from the consent of the governed

Harriet Beecher Stowe

#63. 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

#64. 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

#65. Ultimately, power only really listens to power, and if government is to be improved, we must be able to threaten its existence, not merely its reputation.

Vaclav Havel

#66. 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

#67. 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

#68. In addition to their power over government based on government financing and personal influence, bankers could steer governments in ways they wished them to go by other pressures.

Carroll Quigley

#69. Capitalists desire purchasing power. Socialists lust for the power to plan society. Which is worse?

A.E. Samaan

#70. 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

#71. 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

#72. As the old saying goes, 'money is power' and the more money the government takes, the more power it has over individuals.

Angela McGlowan

#73. 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

#74. 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

#75. If you ask the government to impose morality, then moral questions will be decided by whoever has the most political power.

Harry Browne

#76. 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

#77. When you are subverting the power of government, that's a fundamentally dangerous thing to democracy.

Edward Snowden

#78. 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

#79. 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

#80. I say, that Power must never be trusted without a check.

John Adams

#81. 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

#82. 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

#83. We ought not to forget that the government, through all its departments, judicial as well as others, is administered by delegated and responsible agents; and that the power which really controls, ultimately, all the movements, is not in the agents, but those who elect or appoint them.

John C. Calhoun

#84. 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

#85. 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

#86. We want our government to protect us, to make sure something like 9/11 never happens again. We quickly moved to give law enforcement more power to do this. But that now begs the question, did we move to fast? Did we give too much power away? I don't have the answer.

Michael Connelly

#87. When New Labour came to power, we got a Right-wing Conservative government. I came to realise that voting Labour wasn't in Scotland's interests any more. Any doubt I had about that was cast aside for ever when I saw Gordon Brown cosying up to Margaret Thatcher in Downing Street.

Jimmy Reid

#88. 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

#89. 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

#90. 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

#91. There is nothing anyone can do anyway. The public has no power. The government knows I'm not a criminal. The parole board knows I'm not a criminal. The judge knows I'm not a criminal.

Jack Kevorkian

#92. 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

#93. This administration in Washington that's in power now clearly believes that government is not only the answer to every need, but it's the most qualified to make the most central decisions for every American in every area.

Rick Perry

#94. 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

#95. 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

#96. 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

#97. 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

#98. 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

#99. 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

#100. 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