Top 100 Quotes About Government Tyranny
#1. Does the government fear us? Or do we fear the government? When the people fear the government, tyranny has found victory. The federal government is our servant, not our master!
Thomas Jefferson
#2. Call me an alarmist, but we are witnessing the beginning of the most frightening period of government tyranny in our nation's history.
David Limbaugh
#3. 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
#4. In a healthy nation there is a kind of dramatic balance between the will of the people and the government, which prevents its degeneration into tyranny.
Albert Einstein
#5. The first sign of tyranny is government's complicity in privatizing the commons for private gain.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
#6. In the laws of the land, she has no rights; in government she has no voice. And in spite of another principle recognized in this Republic, namely, that 'taxation without representation is tyranny,' she is taxed without being represented.
Ernestine Rose
#7. No state, no government exists. What does in fact exist is a man, or a few men, in power over many men.
Rose Wilder Lane
#8. If we look at the black record of mass murder, exploitation, and tyranny levied on society by governments over the ages, we need not be loath to abandon the Leviathan State and ... try freedom.
Murray Rothbard
#9. The freedom of individuals from compulsion or coercion never was, and is not now, the normal state of human affairs. The normal state for the ordinary person is tyranny, arbitrary control and abuse mainly by their own government.
Walter E. Williams
#10. The degree of liberty or tyranny in any government is in large degree a reflection of the relative determination of the subjects to be free and their willingness and ability to resist efforts to enslave them.
Gene Sharp
#11. It is an essential tenet of our whole representative form of government, the idea that there should not be some tyranny which makes it so nobody can even have a chance to vote.
Todd Akin
#12. 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
#13. To take a single step beyond the boundaries specially drawn around the powers of Congress is to take possession of a boundless field of power, no longer susceptible to definition.
Thomas Jefferson
#14. Tyranny is always better organized than freedom.
Charles Peguy
#15. I've always considered the government taking one out of every two dollars I earn absolute tyranny.
Steven Van Zandt
#16. I personally call the type of government which can be removed without violence 'democracy,' and the other, 'tyranny.'.
Karl Popper
#17. We are not to expect to be translated from despotism to liberty in a featherbed.
Thomas Jefferson
#18. There's a huge cost to freedom in letting people talk about how you print these plastic guns or letting them say these things about arming for tyranny. There's also a cost to letting the government say these ideas can't be expressed, this is treason. It's difficult.
Glenn Greenwald
#19. The distrust of wit is the beginning of tyranny.
Edward Abbey
#20. Recent school shootings have lured ill-informed Americans into a war on our Second Amendment guarantees, led by the nation's tyrants and their useful idiots ... The Second Amendment was given to us as protection against tyranny by the federal government and the Congress of the United States.
Walter E. Williams
#21. Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms, those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny; and it is believed that the most effectual means of preventing this would be, to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large ...
Thomas Jefferson
#22. Any practice of business which would dominate the country by its own selfish interest is a destruction of equality of opportunity. Government in business, except in emergency, is also a destruction of equal opportunity and the incarnation of tyranny through bureaucracy.
Herbert Hoover
#23. It is of great importance in a republic, not only to guard the society against the oppression of its rulers; but to guard one part of the society against the injustice of the other part.
James Madison
#24. We just can't trust the American people to make those types of choices ... Government has to make those choices for people.
Hillary Rodham Clinton
#26. Poverty is bad,
but so is decadence.
Tyranny is bad,
but so is chaos.
Injustice is bad,
but so is godlessness.
Matshona Dhliwayo
#27. The perversions are as follows: of royalty, tyranny; of aristocracy, oligarchy; of constitutional government, democracy.
Aristotle.
#28. The Second Amendment is timeless for our Founders grasped that self-defense is three-fold: every free individual must protect themselves against the evil will of the man, the mob and the state.
Tiffany Madison
#29. Tyranny is the political corollary of socialism, as representative government is the political corollary of the market economy.
Ludwig Von Mises
#30. When governments fear the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny.
Thomas Jefferson
#31. Bloomberg does not support the measure to silence the useless and maddening car alarm: he would rather impose himself on people than on mechanical devices.
Christopher Hitchens
#32. For any young democracy, the most difficult but important step is burying the legacy of tyranny and establishing an economy and a government and institutions that abide by the rule of law. Every country faces challenges to the rule of law, including my own.
Joe Biden
#33. Without the basis in written law, and without the basis in our Constitution ratified by the people, judges can't make laws. And if we accept the notion that their dictates are law, then we have not only submitted to tyranny, we have abandoned a republican form of government.
Alan Keyes
#34. Weak men cannot handle power. It will either crush them, or they will use it to crush others
Jocelyn Murray
#36. Grammar in learning is like tyranny in government - confound the bitch I'll never be her slave.
John Clare
#37. It will at least be a recommendation to the proposed constitution that it is provided with more checks and barriers against the introduction of tyranny, and those of a nature less liable to be surmounted, than any government hitherto instituted among mortals hath possessed.
George Washington
#38. When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know, the end result is tyranny and oppression no matter how holy the motives.
Robert A. Heinlein
#39. The very purpose of the Second Amendment is to stop the government from disallowing people the means to defend themselves against tyranny. Any proposal to abuse executive power and infringe upon gun rights must be repelled with the stiffest legislative force possible.
Steve Stockman
#40. The welfare state is the oldest con game in the world. First you take people's money away quietly and then you give some of it back to them flamboyantly.
Thomas Sowell
#41. Liberty may make mistakes but tyranny is the death of a nation.
Giacomo Matteotti
#42. "All government in essence," says Emerson, "is tyranny." It matters not whether it is government by divine right or majority rule. In every instance its aim is the absolute subordination of the individual.
Emma Goldman
#43. We spoke and acted as if, given the opportunity for self-government, we would quickly create utopias. Instead injustice, even tyranny, is rampant.
Julius Nyerere
#44. The whole structure of African government, as far back as we know, was based on tyranny. One guy ran the show. Chiefs like Chaka and Mzilikazi committed terrible atrocities. That is the tradition from which modern African rulers spring. It won't change easily overnight.
Wilbur Smith
#45. It is true that liberty is not free, nor is it easy. But tyranny - even varying degrees of it - is much more difficult, and much more expensive. The time has come to rein in the federal government, put it on a crash diet, and let the people keep their money and their liberty.
Ron Paul
#46. The very concept of law that protects us from tyranny has been lost. No longer the people's shield, law has become a weapon in the hands of government.
Paul Craig Roberts
#47. The checks and balances is a way to prevent government from either devolving into an autocratic tyranny or an autocratic mob mentality.
Beau Willimon
#48. By its nature, government was either small and personal, something on the level of a town hall meeting, or it was tyranny, with the few ruling the many for their own benefit, no matter how representational that government might be in theory.
William H. Keith Jr.
#49. All good government must begin at home. It is useless to make good laws for bad people; what is wanted is this, to subdue the tyranny of the human heart.
Hugh Reginald Haweis
#50. It is manifest that the only security against the tyranny of the government lies in forcible resistance to the execution of the injustice; because the injustice will certainly be executed, unless it be forcibly resisted.
Lysander Spooner
#51. Tyranny seldom announces itself ... In fact, a tyranny may exist without an individual tyrant. A whole government, even a democratically elected one, may be tyrannical.
Joseph Sobran
#52. Stable government requires the free consent of those ruled. Tyranny, even the tyranny of benevolent despots, cannot bring lasting peace and prosperity. There
Ludwig Von Mises
#53. When the people are afraid of the government, that's tyranny. But when the government is afraid of the people, that's liberty.
Thomas Jefferson
#54. If the individual has a right to govern himself, all external government is tyranny. Hence the necessity of abolishing the State.
Benjamin Tucker
#55. The most successful supporters of tyranny are without doubt those general declaimers who attribute the distresses of the poor, and almost all evils to which society is subject, to human institutions and the iniquity of governments.
Thomas Malthus
#56. A society that robs an individual of the product of his effort, or enslaves him, or attempts to limit the freedom of his mind, or compels him to act against his own rational judgment ... is not, strictly speaking, a society, but a mob held together by institutionalized gang-rule.
Ayn Rand
#57. No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets.
Edward Abbey
#58. If political authority is not limited, the division of powers, ordinarily the guarantee of freedom, becomes a danger and a scourge.
Benjamin Constant
#59. A government which lays taxes on the people not required by urgent public necessity and sound public policy is not a protector of liberty, but an instrument of tyranny. It condemns the citizen to servitude.
Calvin Coolidge
#60. The legal system we have and the rule of law are far more responsible for our traditional liberties than any system of one man one vote. Any country or Government which wants to proceed towards tyranny starts to undermine legal rights and undermine the law.
Margaret Thatcher
#61. Tyranny is a form of perversion. We come to love it. Every government is a tyranny to a degree, and the more evil it is, the more it is loved. The difficulty lies in judging the degree of tyranny under which you live.
Geoff Ryman
#62. All men recognize the right of revolution; that is, the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist, the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable.
Henry David Thoreau
#63. 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
#64. Tyranny is defined as that which is legal for the government but illegal for the citizenry.
Thomas Jefferson
#65. Our ancestors wholeheartedly sacrificed their lives to fight against tyranny, and we are allowing that very same tyranny to exist! Let us open our eyes!
Yanan Melo
#66. It's all very well to put the government in the hands of the perfect man, but what do you do when the perfect man gets a bellyache?
David Eddings
#67. If we continue to stand up for our rights, none of us alive today will ever have to pick up a weapon against our government. The bad news is that if those rights are watered down or taken away, the risk of tyranny will increase with each passing generation.
Glenn Beck
#68. The revolutionary government is the despotism of liberty against tyranny.
Georg Buchner
#69. Authority that can not be questioned is tyranny Terry Pratchett: A Slip of the Keyboard
Hank Quense
#70. The executive, in our government is not the sole, it is scarcely the principle, object of my jealousy. The tyranny of the legislature is the most formidable dread at present and will be for many years. That of the executive will come in its turn, but it will be at a remote period.
Thomas Jefferson
#71. An easily manipulated population that cares mostly for its own amusement may be more ready for tyranny (which can keep the masses happy with "bread and circuses") than for the arduous responsibilities of self-government.
Gene Edward Veith Jr.
#72. Political tyranny is nothing compared to the social tyranny and a reformer who defies society is a more courageous man than a politician who defies Government.
B.R. Ambedkar
#74. Freedom of speech is a principal pillar of a free government; when this support is taken away, the constitution of a free society is dissolved, and tyranny is erected on its ruins. Republics ... derive their strength and vigor from a popular examination into the action of the magistrates.
Benjamin Franklin
#75. Some boast of being friends to government; I am a friend to righteous government, to a government founded upon the principles of reason and justice; but I glory in publicly avowing my eternal enmity to tyranny.
John Hancock
#76. As soon as government management begins it upsets the natural equilibrium of industrial relations, and each interference only requires further bureaucratic control until the end is the tyranny of the totalitarian state.
Adam Smith
#77. In more than half the nations of our world, torture certifies that the form of government is tyranny. Only tyranny, no matter how camouflaged, needs and employs torturers. Torture has no ideology.
Martha Gellhorn
#78. The essential psychological requirement of a free society is the willingness on the part of the individual to accept responsibility for his life. - Edith Packer
When the government fears the people, it is liberty. When the people fear the government, it is tyranny.
Thomas Paine
#79. It's not tyranny we desire; it's a just, limited, federal government.
Alexander Hamilton
#80. [The Bill of Rights is] designed to protect individuals and minorities against the tyranny of the majority, but it's also designed to protect the people against bureaucracy, against the government.
Laurence Tribe
#81. Government began in tyranny and force, began in the feudalism of the soldier and bigotry of the priest; and the ideas of justice and humanity have been fighting their way, like a thunderstorm, against the organized selfishness of human nature.
Wendell Phillips
#82. Wherever is found what is called a paternal government, there is found state education. It has been discovered that the best way to insure implicit obedience is to commence tyranny in the nursery.
Benjamin Disraeli
#83. When one with honeyed words but evil mind
Persuades the mob, great woes befall the state.
Euripides
#84. The Founders knew that a democracy would lead to some kind of tyranny. The term democracy appears in none of our Founding documents. Their vision for us was a Republic and limited government.
Walter E. Williams
#85. Unless the people can choose their leaders and rulers, and can revoke their choice at intervals long enough to test their measuresby results, the government will be a tyranny exercised in the interests of whatever classes or castes or mobs or cliques have this choice.
George Bernard Shaw
#86. The framers hated the tyranny of King George, but they were also afraid of the mob. That's why they put so many checks and balances into our system, to guard against the excesses of a government that might be inflamed by public passion or perverted by a dictator's whim.
David Ignatius
#87. In Russia, whatever be the appearance of things, violence and arbitrary rule is at the bottom of them all. Tyranny rendered calm by the influence of terror is the only kind of happiness which this government is able to afford its people.
Marquis De Custine
#88. The freest form of government is only the least objectionable form. The rule of the many by the few we call tyranny: the rule of the few by the many is tyranny also; only of a less intense kind.
Herbert Spencer
#89. All government, all exercise of power, no matter in what form, which is not based in love and directed by knowledge, is a tyranny.
Anna Brownell Jameson
#90. When the people fear the government there is tyranny, when the government fears the people there is liberty.
Thomas Jefferson
#91. 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
#92. If you think shrinking government and getting it less involved in your life is a hallmark of tyranny it is only because you are either grotesquely ignorant or because you subscribe to a statist ideology that believes the expansion of the state is the expansion of liberty.
Jonah Goldberg
#93. When scrutiny is lacking, tyranny, corruption and man's baser qualities have a better chance of entering into the public business of any government.
Jacob K. Javits
#94. The debt is being cynically exploited by the far right, with collusion of the Democrat establishment, to undermine what remains of social programs, public education, unions, and, in general, remaining barriers to corporate tyranny.
Noam Chomsky
#95. 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
#96. [Our Constitution] is an instrument for the people to restrain the government.
Patrick Henry
#97. Most gun control arguments miss the point. If all control boils fundamentally to force, how can one resist aggression without equal force? How can a truly "free" state exist if the individual citizen is enslaved to the forceful will of individual or organized aggressors? It cannot.
Tiffany Madison
#98. It is a truth widely recognized that tyranny stems from the consent of the governed as much as democracy does.
Eric Robert Morse
#99. No method of procedure has ever been devised by which liberty could be divorced from local self-government. No plan of centralization has ever been adopted which did not result in bureaucracy, tyranny, inflexibility, reaction, and decline.
Calvin Coolidge
#100. The Conservative does not despise government. He despises tyranny. This is precisely why the Conservative reveres the Constitution and insists on adherence to it.
Mark R. Levin
