Top 95 Quotes About Large Government
#1. Even the dumber parts of our government are not run by idiots. These are ordinary people like us, doing a job. By and large, they're trying to do it as well as they can. Or at least as often as people in the private sector try to do as well as they can.
P. J. O'Rourke
#2. Unemployment is due to the large import of goods from Britain and other countries. The Government haven't used the powers which they have for the benefit of the country.
Eamon De Valera
#3. The establishment of an American Soviet government will involve the confiscation of large landed estates in town and country, and also, the whole body of forests, mineral deposits, lakes, rivers and so on.
William Z. Foster
#4. Tariffs, government contracts, naval and military spending, nationalized industries, tax policy, social welfare, the legal privileging of labor unions were among the means at the disposal of the governing class to exploit the public at large for the benefits of its various clienteles.
Ralph Raico
#5. The trial by jury is a trial by 'the country,' in contradistinction to a trial by the government. The jurors are drawn by lot from the mass of the people, for the very purpose of having all classes of minds and feelings, that prevail among the people at large, represented in the jury.
Lysander Spooner
#6. I don't believe any person looking for work is fearful of political judgment. Government is a large institution, and if they believe that people are going to get rid of good employees for political reasons, that's absurd.
Jan Brewer
#7. A large fraction of our total economy has grown up around providing service and counseling to inadequate people
and inadequate people are the main product of government compulsion schools.
John Taylor Gatto
#8. A large brain, like large government, may not be able to do simple things in a simple way.
Donald O. Hebb
#9. I sincerely believe that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies, and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale.
Thomas Jefferson
#10. 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
#11. The time has come, or is about to come, when only large-scale civil disobedience, which should be nonviolent, can save the populations from the universal death which their governments are preparing for them.
Bertrand Russell
#12. The story of the Western world since 1945 is that, invited to choose between freedom and government 'security,' large numbers of people vote to dump freedom every time - the freedom to make your own decisions about health care, education, property rights, and a ton of other stuff.
Mark Steyn
#13. I am often asked if, when I was secretary, I had problems with foreign men. That is not who I had problems with, because I arrived in a very large plane that said United States of America. I had more problems with the men in our own government.
Madeleine Albright
#14. Nine out of every 10 large corporations and government agencies have been attacked by computer intruders.
Kevin Mitnick
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. When the citizens at large administer the state for the common interest, the government is called by the generic name - a constitution.
Aristotle.
#18. A State divided into a small number of rich and a large number of poor will always develop a government manipulated by the rich to protect the amenities represented by their property.
Harold Laski
#19. In poor countries, officials receive explicit bribes; in D.C. they get the sophisticated, implicit, unspoken promise to work for large corporations
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#20. There are twenty-seven specific complaints against the British Crown set forth in the Declaration of Independence. To modern ears they still sound reasonable ... in large part, because so many of them can be leveled against the federal government of the United States.
P. J. O'Rourke
#21. It's hard to make something as large as a government change. It's a little bit like building the transcontinental railroad.
Tim O'Reilly
#22. The federal government now spends one of every four dollars in the entire economy. It borrows one of every three dollars it spends. No nation, no entity, large or small, public or private, can thrive, or survive intact, with debts as huge as ours.
Mitch Daniels
#23. The greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government.
Charles Lindbergh
#24. To the size of the state there is a limit, as there is to plants, animals and implements, for none of these retain their facility when they are too large.
Aristotle.
#25. Since Yuri Gagarin and Al Shepard's epoch flights in 1961, all space missions have been flown only under large, expensive government efforts. By contrast, our program involves a few, dedicated individuals who are focused entirely on making spaceflight affordable.
Burt Rutan
#26. The Internet was developed in large part by U.S. government research funding to develop new communications networks, starting with a network created by the Department of Defense.
Robin Hayes
#27. Inside Iran, people are actually quite well-educated about America. There are things they don't understand, particularly in the government, but the people, by and large, know the American sensibility quite well, and the reverse is not true.
Hooman Majd
#28. The government is a very large constructor. They have schools, colleges, hospitals and courts, offices. We are trying to influence the public works department to adopt green buildings.
Jamshyd Godrej
#29. The government satirizes itself. All we can wish is that there will be a large number of Americans who will realize how dumb this all is, and how greedy and how vicious. Such an audience is dwindling all the time because of TV.
Kurt Vonnegut
#30. Nowhere has democracy ever worked well without a great measure of local self-government, providing a school of political training for the people at large as much as for their future leaders.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#31. The question, then, for Western companies, as much as for Western governments, is to decide whose side they are on: the Chinese officials who like to define their culture in a paternalistic, authoritarian way, or the large number of Chinese who have their own ideas about freedom.
Ian Buruma
#32. I think the universities have co-opted the intellectual, by and large. But there is an emerging intellectual set coming out of Washington think tanks now. There are people who are leaving the universities and working for the government or in think tanks, simply looking for freedom.
Richard Rodriguez
#33. Governing a large state is like boiling a small fish.
Laozi
#34. The Government and the Parliament, even the House of Lords, will consent to a large increase of electors; and men who have not considered the subject fully will imagine they have gained much by the concession.
John Bright
#35. Every individual of the community at large has an equal right to the protection of government.
Alexander Hamilton
#36. To Sherman, a large, complicated national government was contrary to "the true spirit and genius of republican government," which should be small and simple:
Mark David Hall
#37. Moreover, in Russia there was an enormous amount of landed property to be divided, large estates, crown lands, government land, and the estates held by the monasteries.
Herman Gorter
#38. Corruption is the enemy of development, and of good governance. It must be got rid of. Both the government and the people at large must come together to achieve this national objective.
Pratibha Patil
#39. 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
#40. As quickly as you start spending federal money in large amounts, it looks like free money.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
#41. The government-sponsored institution Fannie Mae, when I look at its risks, seems to be sitting on a barrel of dynamite, vulnerable to the slightest hiccup. But not to worry: their large staff of scientists deemed these events "unlikely."
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#42. Free government cannot long endure if property is largely in a few hands, and large masses of people are unable to earn homes, education, and a support in old age.
Rutherford B. Hayes
#43. A very large majority of the U.S. population is in favor of establishing diplomatic relations with Cuba and has been for a long time with some fluctuations. And even part of the business world is in favor of it, too. But the government won't allow it.
Noam Chomsky
#44. 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
#45. The experience of learning how to get straight to the core of a problem proved to be of immense value later when I had a long succession of responsibilities in large, complex government departments.
Elliot Richardson
#46. Not every innovation in transportation is going to come from government or even a large enterprise. There are smart people out there with tools and skills to come up with great ideas.
Anthony Foxx
#47. Weighing benefits against costs is the way most people make decisions - and the way most businesses make decisions, if they want to stay in business. Only in government is any benefit, however small, considered to be worth any cost, however large.
Thomas Sowell
#48. Governments take too long to get things done and there are far too many varied interests at stake. If you were starting a business today and needed a partner, you would never choose a large bureaucratic institution like the government.
Naveen Jain
#49. As good government is an empire of laws, how shall your laws be made? In a large society, inhabiting an extensive country, it is impossible that the whole should assemble to make laws. The first necessary step, then, is to depute power from the many to a few of the most wise and good.
John Adams
#50. 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
#51. Cynical, hell. I'm a healthy old man with a constitutional mistrust of paternalism and government in large doses.
Harper Lee
#52. In a government whose distinguishing characteristic should be a diffusion and equalization of its benefits and burdens the advantage of individuals will be augmented at the expense of the community at large.
Martin Van Buren
#53. Any large extension of the Government into business affairs - no matter what the pretense and no matter how the the extension is labeled - will be bound to promote waste and put a curb on our prosperity and progress.
Thomas A. Edison
#54. The government is trying to now close the Lincoln Memorial for any kind of large gatherings.
Glenn Beck
#55. Denial itself was institutionalized as a government function. Since 1923, the Turkish government has spent tens of millions of dollars in a concerted disinformation campaign to delude the world at large and, perhaps more important, its own people.
Eric Bogosian
#56. Through the 1990s, the fracturing of Tasmanian Aboriginal politics was given impetus by the ongoing corruption of a number of black organisations started under federal government programmes, with large amounts of public money being lost.
Richard Flanagan
#57. Common sense tells us that the government's attempts to solve large problems more often create new ones. Common sense also tells us that a top-down, one-size-fits-all plan will not improve the workings of a nationwide health-care system that accounts for one-sixth of our economy.
Sarah Palin
#58. We have built a government so large and so expensive here in Washington that not even the richest economy in the history of mankind can afford it. That's how big it's gotten.
Marco Rubio
#59. Governments are not built to perceive large truths. Only people can perceive great truths. Governments specialize in small and intermediate truths. They have to be instructed by their people in great truths.
Norman Cousins
#60. Large companies and government agencies have a lot to protect and therefore are not willing to take big risks. A large company taking a risk can threaten its stock price. A government agency taking a risk can threaten congressional investigation.
Peter Diamandis
#61. Governments first of all have been able to amass, through the taxation process, large sums of capital which they have redistributed to persons or groups, already large holders of capital, through official subsidies.
Immanuel Wallerstein
#62. Paradoxically, resource-rich developing countries are often worse off than comparable countries that lack those resources. One reason for this is that large resource endowments provide a huge financial incentive for attempts to overthrow the government and seize power.
Peter Singer
#63. I believe that government is too large, costs too much, spends too much, and has too much regulatory power in our lives.
Tim Walberg
#64. The main purpose of Social Security is to redistribute wealth, to make an increasingly large number of Americans dependent on government for their basic needs in their retirement years.
Neal Boortz
#65. While the Governor, and the Mayor, and countless officers of the Commonwealth are at large, the champions of liberty are imprisoned.
Henry David Thoreau
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. No one will expect the British Government or the Government of India to give way to threats of violence, disorder and chaos; and, indeed, representatives of large sections of Indian opinion have expressly warned us that we must not do so.
Stafford Cripps
#69. The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the large centers has owned the government of the U.S. since the days of Andrew Jackson.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#70. A nation's exchange rate is the single most important price in its economy; it will influence the entire range of individual prices, imports and exports, and even the level of economic activity. So it is hard for any government to ignore large swings in its exchange rate ...
Paul Volcker
#71. The connection which formerly existed between the Government and banks was in reality injurious to both, as well as to the general interests of the community at large.
Martin Van Buren
#72. If the United States is hit with a weapon of mass destruction that inflicts large casualties, the Constitution will likely be discarded in favor of a military form of government.
Tommy Franks
#73. Even if only 2 percent of those assigned to perform military service should announce their refusal to fight, governments would be powerless, they would not dare send such a large number of people to jail.
Albert Einstein
#74. If you look at how the federal government spends our money, it's an insurance conglomerate protected by a large, standing army.
Ezra Klein
#75. South Sydney is a very complicated and wonderful place. You have some of the most expensive bits of real estate in the country and a large percentage of government housing.
Russell Crowe
#76. Spain as a modern centralized nation is an illusion, a very unfortunate one; for the present atrophy, the desolating resultlessness of a century of revolution, may very well be due in large measure to the artificial imposition of centralized government on a land essentially centrifugal.
John Dos Passos
#77. There is no act too small, no act too bold. The history of social change is the history of millions of actions, small and large, coming together at critical points to create a power that governments cannot suppress.
Howard Zinn
#78. Serial killers do, on a small scale, what governments do on a large one. They are products of our times and these are bloodthirsty times.
Richard Ramirez
#79. Besides, we had a large debt, contracted at home and abroad in our War of Independence; therefore the great power of taxation was conferred upon this Government.
Robert Toombs
#80. The class which has the power to rob upon a large scale has also the power to control the government and legalize their robbery.
Eugene V. Debs
#81. We're responsible for the fortunes of the company but this is a bone-dry situation in terms of access to credit. Nobody can operate on that basis unless you have large cash balances, which we don't. My concern is that the government doesn't appear to care about manufacturing.
Ratan Tata
#82. Children's lives are not shaped solely by their families or immediate surroundings at large. That is why we must avoid the false dichotomy that says only government or only family is responsible ... Personal values and national policies must both play a role.
Hillary Clinton
#83. Large and permanent military establishments ... are forbidden by the principles of free government, and against the necessity of which the militia were meant to be a constitutional bulwark.
James Madison
#84. Individual people shouldn't be fearful, because by and large our government, the federal government - people always talk; obviously, they don't trust the feds, whatever. The federal government and local communities have done a pretty good job at keeping us safe.
Sherrod Brown
#85. The government can't get away with large-scale famine, but it can get away with chronic hunger. It has become an accepted part of life in India.
Jean Dreze
#86. It is the government's strong desire to empower this fabric, this social fabric of our society where faith-based programs large and small feel empowered, encouraged, and welcomed into changing lives.
George W. Bush
#87. Another touchy point: the inability of successive Israeli governments to deal with the propaganda war. Israel has a brilliant instrument in the IDF. We have a cyber-war unit which may become the best unit in the world to fight cyber problems. On the propaganda war ... it is a large failure.
Manfred Gerstenfeld
#88. The close relationship between politics and economics is neither neutral nor coincidental. Large governments evolve through history in order to protect large accumulations of property and wealth.
Michael Parenti
#90. Ohioans, I think, in large numbers, have felt that the government has not been on their side in all of these issues: on pensions, on the cost of prescription drugs, on the health-care system generally, on jobs, on trade agreements.
Sherrod Brown
#91. The president has been a true friend of the ag industry, because he continues to invest large amounts of money at a time when savings is really the goal of the federal government to deal with the deficit.
Mike Johanns
#92. This is a government takeover of our healthcare system. It is the government basically running the entire healthcare system, turning large insurers into de facto public utilities, depriving people of choice, depriving people of options, raising people's prices, raising taxes when we need new jobs.
Paul Ryan
#93. According to recent opinion polls, a large majority of Iraqis believe that the U.S. military has no intention to leave Iraq, and that it would stay even is asked by the Iraqi government to leave.
John Conyers
#94. As a CEO of a large company, clearly we need policies in the U.S. government that are pro-business, because at the end of the day, we all work within the framework of a country's policies.
Indra Nooyi
#95. They should set a very clear priority for the government. There is such a large penumbra of issues. The party needs to come to grips with the reality that it has to be coherent politically.
Mahesh Rangarajan