Top 100 Quotes About Less Government
#1. Americans for Tax Reform is a national taxpayer organization dedicated to opposing any and all tax increases. We work at the national, state and local level for lower taxes, less government spending and limited government.
Grover Norquist
#2. Certainly, the job of a U.S. senator is to create a climate conducive to creating jobs, which is lower taxes and less government regulation. What Harry Reid has been doing is putting forward those policies that actually put more regulation on business.
Sharron Angle
#3. I can describe, and I've always been able to describe, what Republicans stand for in eight words, and the eight words are lower taxes, less government, strong defense and family values.
Byron Dorgan
#4. I don't believe in government. I hate politics. I'm against it. And I hope that sometime this fall, we can destroy part of our government, and next year destroy even more of it. The less government, the happier I will be.
Ray Bradbury
#5. The basis of conservatism is a desire for less government interference or less centralized authority or more individual freedom.
Ronald Reagan
#6. The UK desperately needs less government and freer markets.
Rupert Murdoch
#7. I hope all of you are going to fill out your census form when it comes in the mail next month. If you don't return the form the area you live in might get less government money and you wouldn't want that to happen, would you.
Andy Rooney
#8. Conservatives don't merely want less government. They want to raise spending for the military - even bring back Star Wars - not reduce it. They want to build more prisons. There is no move to eliminate the drug enforcement agency.
George Lakoff
#9. The Republicans didn't want the government to run your life, because Jesus should. That was really part of their thing: less government, more Jesus. Now it's like, how about more government and Jesus?
Trey Parker
#10. I'm not really conservative. I'm conservative on certain things. I believe in less government. I believe in fiscal responsibility and all those things that maybe Republicans used to believe in but don't any more.
Clint Eastwood
#11. The Republicans have lost their standards; they've lost their principles ... Really, that's why the machine in the Republican Party is fighting against me ... They have never really gone along with lower taxes and less government.
Sharron Angle
#14. I believe in less government interference in people's personal lives, including whom to marry, when and whether to bear a child and how to raise kind and compassionate children.
Ann McLane Kuster
#15. I'm a Democrat, and there are an important group of things only the government can do. But let us be clear that for most of the world, what they most need is less government.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
#16. Free enterprise is a natural result of the American form of government, which says in so many words that the more men do for themselves, the less government does for them, the better off we will all be.
Felix Morley
#17. The real cure for what ails our health care system today is less government and more freedom.
Steve Forbes
#18. Feudalism, serfdom, slavery, all tyrannical institutions, are merely the most vigorous kind to rule, springing out of, and necessarily to, a bad state of man. The progress from these is the same in all cases - less government.
Herbert Spencer
#19. The less government interferes with private pursuits, the better for general prosperity.
Martin Van Buren
#21. Whether Canada ends up with one national government or two governments or 10 governments, the Canadian people will require less government no matter what the constitutional status or arrangement of any future country may be.
Stephen Harper
#22. President Obama wants to increase the size of government and raise taxes, while I support less government and more individual freedom.
Ralph Hall
#23. The fact is, my friends, most Americans don't want more government. They want less government.
Mike Huckabee
#24. I really didn't know much about the Libertarians. I knew they were for less government and more individual freedom. I liked that.
Howard Stern
#25. It is America, I don't want the government trying to control more of my life. I want less government control, and I think there are too many government regulations, laws and taxes on the books.
Trent Lott
#26. One thing is certain: those who worked and voted for less government, the very foot soldiers in the conservative revolution, have been deceived. Today, the ideal of limited government has been abandoned by the GOP, and real conservatives find their views no longer matter.
Ron Paul
#27. I think the Republican Party is supposed to be the party of less government intrusion.
Monica Crowley
#28. 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
#29. Lower taxes, less government spending on domestic programs and fewer regulations mean a better economy for everybody.
Larry Elder
#30. In the book I define conservatism, as I believe it is fit upon four categories of principle: respect for The Constitution, respect for life, less government, and personal responsibility.
Jonathan Krohn
#31. I've been a Republican all my life because I embrace the conservative values of hard work, personal freedom, less government and fewer taxes. But I also believe in compassion, inclusion, and helping those who want to help themselves.
Lionel Sosa
#33. One of the reasons that I am in favor of less government is because when you have more government, industrialists take it over.
Milton Friedman
#35. The American people have made it abundantly clear that they want less government, not more. They want problems solved in a bipartisan manner, not the creation of new problems.
Marsha Blackburn
#36. People are probably going to realize they can live with a lot less government than what they thought they needed.
Marsha Blackburn
#37. More freedom means more jobs ... less government and less taxes.
Todd Akin
#38. I don't even like the word politics. It implies something underhanded and I think we need less government.
Jay-Z
#39. I'm not a knee-jerk conservative. I passionately believe in free markets and less government, but not to the point of being a libertarian.
Rupert Murdoch
#40. We in Tennessee know that low taxes, less government, and less spending are the ways to grow our economy.
Marsha Blackburn
#41. The way I look at it is this, as Republicans, we look for less government interference in our lives.
Craig Benson
#42. The Roman government appeared every day less formidable to its enemies, more odious and oppressive to its subjects.
Edward Gibbon
#43. States are far less violent than traditional bands and tribes. Modern Western countries, even in their most war-torn centuries, suffered no more than around a quarter of the average death rate of nonstate societies, and less than a tenth of that for the most violent one.
Steven Pinker
#44. Whatever the rationale, the suppression of unorthodox cancer therapies and the sustained persecution of their proponents by government and colleagues runs counter to freedom of thought, much less freedom of choice.
Marilyn Ferguson
#45. The government will support you to the utmost of its ability, which is neither more nor less than it has done and will do for allcommanders.
Abraham Lincoln
#46. 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
#47. Some people think my father was a spy, because of working for that government agency in Vietnam, but he can't find his car keys, much less keep a national secret.
Lauren Graham
#48. Gold is a relic from a time when government's were less trustworthy in these matters (currency debasement) than they are now.
John Maynard Keynes
#49. 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
#50. If you ask people do you think that government should spend less money than what it takes in, most people agree with that.
Michele Bachmann
#51. Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free. Nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinion has drawn indelible lines of distinction between them.
Thomas Jefferson
#52. While the feds ... leave Social Security off their books, the government's obligation to make benefit payments to current and near-term Social Security recipients is certainly no less real than its obligation to pay interest on its Treasury bonds.
Laurence Kotlikoff
#53. During Vietnam, I was in college, enjoying my student deferment. The government wisely felt that, in my case, military service was less important than completing my studies to prepare me for my chosen career: comedian.
Al Franken
#54. People invest in companies in order to get a share of the profit that company will make. If the Government increases its share of the profits, potential profits, at the expense of the owners of the company, the shareholders, then that makes investment in that company less attractive.
Malcolm Turnbull
#55. The political criminal is the victim of an attempt of a more or less despotic government to preserve its own stability. He is not necessarily guilty of an unsocial offense; he simply tries to overturn a certain political order which may itself be anti-social.
Emma Goldman
#56. I would say that since the war, our methods-out and those of the opposition-have become much the same. I mean you can't be less ruthless than the opposition simply because your government's 'policy' is benevolent, can you now?
John Le Carre
#57. There is not much less vexation in the government of a private family than in the managing of an entire state.
Michel De Montaigne
#58. There seems to be less obvious corruption in city government and New York politicians, they aren't Republican or Democrat, they're New Yorkers.
Malachy McCourt
#59. It is bad policy to regulate everything ... where things may better regulate themselves and can be better promoted by private exertions; but it is no less bad policy to let those things alone which can only be promoted by interfering social power.
Friedrich List
#60. Just as China achieved much more than India in the realm of public health and education under an austere Communist regime, so its economic growth under a capitalist-friendly government strikes a visitor from India as nothing less than spectacular.
Pankaj Mishra
#61. We need citizens who are less concerned about what their government can do for them, and more concerned about what they can do for the nation.
Warren G. Harding
#62. My view is the less the government can do and the more freedom and opportunity you give people, that trusting people and free people and free enterprise - that America has built the greatest country in the history of the world.
Rick Santorum
#63. With the Australian Government paying more of the hospital bills, it will have the incentive to make sure people are treated through less expensive and more appropriate primary care services.
Kevin Rudd
#64. Americans must either choose big government and be willing to pay for and submit to it, or they must move toward smaller, less intrusive government and be willing to enjoy fewer government programs.
Oliver DeMille
#65. We do not believe that if you cut back what government does you diminish its authority. On the contrary, a government that did less, and therefore did better, would strengthen its authority.
Margaret Thatcher
#66. All religions united with government are more or less inimical to liberty. All, separated from government, are compatible with liberty.
Henry Clay
#67. We must have government that spends less and does less.
Tom Coburn
#68. Transparency in government, no less than transparency in choosing government, remains a vital national interest in a democracy.
Merrick Garland
#69. 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
#70. Americans want government that is leaner, more efficient, and less intrusive into their personal lives.
Rick Perry
#71. Conventional wisdom on government's role in inequality often has it backwards. Tax reforms have resulted in a more progressive federal income tax; government transfer payments have become less progressive.
Paul Ryan
#72. Liberal redistributionists in favor of heavy taxation place less weight on incentive than do small-government conservatives.
Edmund Phelps
#73. When Alexander the Great visited the philosopher Diogenes and asked whether he could do anything for him, Diogenes is said to have replied: 'Yes, stand a little less between me and the sun.' It is what every citizen is entitled to ask of his government.
Henry Hazlitt
#74. Cowardice is impotence worse than violence. The coward desires revenge but being afraid to die, he looks to others, maybe to the government of the day, to do the work of defense for him. A coward is less than a man. He does not deserve to be a member of a society of men and women.
Mahatma Gandhi
#75. There have been linkages between the Iraqi government and al-Qaeda going back more or less a decade.
Douglas Feith
#76. On some level, there's a limit to what the government really worries about when it comes to a guy like Ai Weiwei, who's talking to a limited audience of people. He's talking to people who more or less already agree with him.
Evan Osnos
#77. Peace will come to earth when the people have more to do with each other and governments less.
Richard Cobden
#78. The further the departure from direct and constant control by the citizens, the less has the government of the ingredient of republicanism ...
Thomas Jefferson
#79. The lowly squabble over trifles. The great wage secret wars for power and wealth, and they call it government. Wars of words, and tricks, and guile, but no less bloody for that.
Joe Abercrombie
#80. The main mark of modern governments is that we do not know who governs, de facto any more than de jure. We see the politician and not his backer; still less the backer of the backer; or, what is most important of all, the banker of the backer.
J.R.R. Tolkien
#81. Self government is no less essential to the development, growth, and happiness of the individual than to the nation.
William H. Douglas
#82. Remain close to government and away from politics. It means deal more with the authorities. And less with individuals.
Wang Jianlin
#83. At some point, the government expands into the private sphere so far that you live in a place with a whole lot less freedom. I didn't like that that was the direction of travel for our country, and decided to come to Washington to try and be a small part of bringing it back.
Mike Pompeo
#84. The government has made $44 trillion in promises we can't afford to keep. We must get serious now about our long-term budgetary problems, recognizing that the sooner we act, the less painful the choices will be.
Judd Gregg
#85. Government acquisition of food supplies in time of war is no less important than conscription. Equity is the fundamental principle applicable to both these essential phases of war administration.
Chiang Kai-shek
#86. The greater the share the people have in government, the less liberty, civil or religious, does a nation enjoy.
John Wesley
#87. Government caters to those screaming the loudest, regardless of what they're screaming about. In business, it's exactly the opposite! You invest more in the most successful departments, and less in those that aren't performing.
Michael Bloomberg
#88. Everywhere you look for comparisons of life under anarchy and life under government, life under government is less violent.
Steven Pinker
#89. Economists specialize in pointing out unpleasant trade-offs - a skill that is on full display in the health care debate. We want patients to receive the best care available. We also want consumers to pay less. And we don't want to bankrupt the government or private insurers. Something must give.
Sendhil Mullainathan
#90. The smaller the unit of government and the more restricted the functions assigned government, the less likely it is that its actions will reflect special interests rather than the general interest.
Milton Friedman
#91. Government can encourage innovation, but mainly by doing less, not doing more.
Matt Ridley
#92. Isolated individuals, not members of such groups, usually are unable to make a significant impact on the rest of the society, much less a government, and certainly not a dictatorship.
Anonymous
#93. Your parents have to nod and agree. A few even celebrate, because the Republic gives them one thousand Notes as a condolence gift. Money and one less mouth to feed? What a thoughtful government.
Marie Lu
#94. 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
#95. In a free society, the 'vision thing' is left to private individuals; civil servants are kept on a tight leash, because free people understand that a 'visionary' bureaucrat is a voracious one and that the grander the government ... the poorer and less free the people.
Ilana Mercer
#96. 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
#97. I thought you'd be interested in these things as a government man. Ain't you mixed up in the prices of things we eat or something? Ain't that it? Making them more costly or something. Making the grits cost more and the grunts less?
Ernest Hemingway,
#98. My government, you can be assured, will be less focused on personalities. It is about treating people with respect. I think complaining about the community not being able to see the wisdom of our ideas is the wrong approach.
Jay Weatherill
#99. Once upon a time, government budgets were balanced, our money was sound, the streets were safe, and taxes imposed by all levels of government took less than 10% of our income.
Harry Browne
#100. Quite simply, there can be no popular sovereignty without a real belief in the value of government. If government does not assume and carry out public responsibilities, less accountable institutions such as the corporation will do the job in their own self-interest.
Charles Derber
