Top 100 Self Government Quotes
#1. We make a great mistake in supposing all people are capable of self-government.
John C. Calhoun
#2. The necessity for external government to man is in an inverse ratio to the vigor of his self-government. Where the last is most complete, the first is least wanted. Hence, the more virtue the more liberty.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#3. There can be no self-government without self-discipline. There can be no self-government without self-control. There can be no liberty unless it is grounded in moral discipline and the ability to do what is right.
Alan Keyes
#4. Belize is not ready for self-government.
John McAfee
#5. Good government is no substitute for self-government.
Mahatma Gandhi
#6. I am a political animal, because for God's sakes I think "We The People" is a job. I think experienced self government demands on all levels - intellectual, moral, historical, and spiritual level. We are supposed to be engaged and give directions to our elected employees.
Ted Nugent
#7. The right of self-government does not comprehend the government of others.
Thomas Jefferson
#8. None of this is fair to you. And should it continue, it will make it more difficult to keep attracting the kind of driven, patriotic, idealist Americans to public service that our citizens deserved and that our system of self-government demands.
Barack Obama
#9. 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.
#10. That future depends on the values of self-government, our sense of duty, loyalty, self-confidence and regard for the common good. We are a diverse country, and getting more diverse. And these virtues are what keep this great country together.
Jeff Miller
#11. Self-government will not work unless the citizens bear the responsibility to vote in such a way that continues their freedoms and their ability to have free elections, that continues their economic prosperity. They have to vote in a way that does not trade the future for the present. This
Eric Metaxas
#12. It is not yet too late for the Indian people to decide on rapid, ordered progress. I can assure them that the British people are as determined upon self-government for India as they are themselves.
Stafford Cripps
#13. We are in a degenerate state of self-government. In fact, even to use the words self-government, is not only an exaggeration, it's a lie. It's a big lie!
Jerry Brown
#14. Effective self-government cannot succeed unless the people are immersed in a steady, robust, unimpeded, and uncensored flow of opinion and reporting which are continuously subjected to critique, rebuttal, and reexamination.
William O. Douglas
#15. If we cannot count on ourselves to do the right thing how can we count on anyone or anything else? Self-government won't work without self-discipline.
Paul Harvey
#16. ANARCHY, or the government of each man by himself or as the English say, self -government.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
#17. I think that it's always appropriate for Americans and for American foreign policy to make clear why we feel that self-government is most compatible with peace, the well-being of people, and human dignity.
Jeane Kirkpatrick
#18. As I get older ... I become more convinced that good government is not a substitute for self-government.
Dwight Morrow
#19. [It is a] happy truth that man is capable of self-government, and only rendered otherwise by the moral degradation designedly superinduced on him by the wicked acts of his tyrant.
Thomas Jefferson
#20. Our mission is not to impose our peculiar institutions upon other nations by physical force or diplomatic treachery but rather by internal peace and prosperity to solve the problem of self-government and reconcile democratic freedom with national stability.
Benjamin Harrison
#21. The basis of self-government and freedom requires the development of character and self-restraint and perseverance and the long view. And these are qualities which require many years of training and education.
John F. Kennedy
#22. Democratic self-government has manifestly brought benefits to India, Japan, Norway, Switzerland, South Africa, South Korea, and scores of nations all making their way in the world.
Michael Gove
#23. We can not overestimate the fervent love of liberty, the intelligent courage, and the sum of common sense with which our fathers made the great experiment of self-government.
James A. Garfield
#24. By contrast, China is a repressive regime that denies its citizens the essential freedoms of religion, political dissent and representative self-government.
Todd Akin
#25. The emblem of equal rights. It means free hands, free lips, self- government, and the sovereignty of the individual.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#26. 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
#27. Our forefathers found the evils of free thinking more to be endured than the evils of inquest or suppression. This is because thoughtful, bold and independent minds are essential to the wise and considered self-government.
Robert H. Jackson
#28. May it be to the world ... to assume the blessings and security of self-government.
Thomas Jefferson
#29. Years ago on my radio show, I used to say, 'I'm a conservative, but I'm not in a bad mood about it.' I've always believed that civility in heavy doses is essential in self-government.
Mike Pence
#30. I have a job to pay attention. It is my number one duty as a human being - to earn an experiment in self-government every day by spotlighting cockroaches who violate their oath to the US constitution and wipe their ass with the US Constitution
Ted Nugent
#31. Self government is no less essential to the development, growth, and happiness of the individual than to the nation.
William H. Douglas
#32. 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
#33. We have pledged ourselves, and of this the United Nations of the world are witness, to give the fullest opportunity for attainment of self-government by India as soon as hostilities are over. I repeat that that is beyond doubt.
Stafford Cripps
#34. When the white man governs himself, that is self-government; but when he governs himself and also governs another man, that is more than self-government - that is despotism.
Abraham Lincoln
#35. Self-government can succeed only through an instructed electorate.
Herbert Hoover
#36. Self-government by the whole people is the teleologic idea. The republican form of government is the noblest and the best, as it is the latest.
Henry Ward Beecher
#37. It is often said that our modern world is incapable of self-government.
Robert A. Agresta
#38. Liberty demands self-government, but not the right to interfere with others.
Bertrand Russell
#39. Men should do their actual living and working in communities small enough to permit of genuine self-government and the assumption of personal responsibilities, federated into larger units in such a way that the temptation to abuse great power should not arise.
Mahatma Gandhi
#40. A system of limitless individual choices, with respect to communications, is not necessarily in the interest of citizenship and self-government.
Cass Sunstein
#41. The war ... must go on till the last man of this generation falls in his tracks ... unless you acknowledge our right to self-government. We are not fighting for slavery. We are fighting for Independence,and that, or extermination, we WILL have.
Jefferson Davis
#42. In historical and constitutional terms, the recent political status vote in Puerto Rico was a necessary but obviously not decisive step on the road of self-determination leading to full self-government.
Dick Thornburgh
#43. The advent of self-government for the Iraqi people is a watershed moment in their history.
Todd Akin
#44. Complete self-government for the province [gubernia and region], district and community through bureaucrats elected by universal suffrage; the abolition of all local and provincial authorities appointed by the state.
Vladimir Lenin
#45. There is no happiness without liberty, no liberty without self-government, no self-government without constitutionalism, no constitutionalism without morality
and none of these great goods without stability and order.
Clinton Rossiter
#46. We prefer self-government with danger to servitude in tranquility.
Kwame Nkrumah
#47. I now proceed to demonstrate that the Mexicans are wholly incapable of self-government, and that our liberties, our fortunes and our lives are insecure so long as we are connected with them.
William H. Wharton
#48. God has endowed man with inalienable rights, among which are self-government, reason, and conscience. Man is properly self-governed only when he is guided rightly and governed by his Maker, divine Truth and Love.
John Dryden
#49. The qualifications for self-government in society are not innate. they are the result of habit and long training.
Thomas Jefferson
#50. Russian democracy is the power of the Russian people with their own traditions of national self-government, and not the realisation of standards foisted on us from outside.
Vladimir Putin
#51. Self-government relies, in the end, on the governing of the self.
George W. Bush
#52. [We should be] determined ... to sever ourselves from the union we so much value rather than give up the rights of self-government ... in which alone we see liberty, safety and happiness.
Thomas Jefferson
#53. Self-government does not and should not imply the use of political agencies alone. Progress is born of cooperation in the community - not from governmental restraints.
Herbert Hoover
#54. Keep steady in the view of the great principles for which you contend. The safety of your homes and the lives of all you hold dear depend upon your courage and exertions. Let each man resolve to be victorious, and that the right of self government, liberty and peace shall find him a defender.
Robert E.Lee
#55. I rejoice when I hear of young men of virtue and talents, worthy to receive and likely to preserve the splendid inheritance of self- government, which we have acquired and shaped for them.
Thomas Jefferson
#56. No one, I hope, can doubt my wish to see ... all mankind exercising self-government, and capable of exercising it. But the question is not what we wish, but what is practicable.
Thomas Jefferson
#57. The idea of self-government is foreign to Americans ... Self-government is a form of self-control, self-limitation. It goes against our whole grain. We're supposed to go after what we want, not question whether we really need it.
Judith Perelman Rossner
#58. I got active in this business of politics and self-government in 1958 when my father, who was serving in the U.S. Army, took us to the battlefield of Verdun.
Newt Gingrich
#59. We can't have self-government without the self-confidence that is at the root of it.
Anita Roddick
#60. Nonviolent attainment of self-government presupposes a non-violent control over the violent elements in the country.
Mahatma Gandhi
#61. It behooves our citizens to be on their guard, to be firm in their principles, and full of confidence in themselves. We are able to preserve our self-government if we will but think so.
Thomas Jefferson
#62. The present generation has the same right of self-government which the past one has exercised for itself.
Thomas Jefferson
#63. If we are to give the people of China complete self-government we must first solve the problem of livelihood for all, and give real freedom to the races within China. If the foundations of democracy are secure, then true equality can be achieved.
Chiang Kai-shek
#64. There is no greatness apart from self control. Development that does not include self government will only guarantee our mediocrity.
Graham Cooke
#65. We act not for ourselves but for the whole human race. The event of our experiment is to show whether man can be trusted with self - government.
Thomas Jefferson
#66. If the new government rejects our urgent appeal, we will, next year, in solidarity with our people, intensify our struggle for self-determination, our struggle for national liberation to establish self-government in our homeland.
Velupillai Prabhakaran
#67. Internal self-government under a local constitution was authorized by Congress and approved by the residents in 1952, but federal law is supreme in Puerto Rico and residents do not have voting representation in the Congress.
Dick Thornburgh
#68. Peoples nurtured on freedom and self-government judge any other form of polity to be deformed and unnatural. Those who are used to monarchy do the same .
Michel De Montaigne
#69. Iranians hate Arabs. They're a fairly well-educated population and they have centuries of experience with self-government.
Michael Ledeen
#70. Self Government by extravagance and incompetence brings its own end.
Will Durant
#71. Measures of self-government and a school council, especially for such young children, were a great innovation.
Dora Russell
#72. Self-denial is the test and definition of self-government.
G.K. Chesterton
#73. India was the motherland of our race
and Sanskrit the mother of Europe's languages.
India was the mother of our philosophy,
of much of our mathematics, of the ideals embodied in
Christianity ... of self-government and democracy.
In many ways, Mother India is the mother of us all.
Will Durant
#74. No scheme of self-government, however benevolently or generously it may be bestowed upon us, will ever make us a self-governing nation, if we have no respect for the languages our mothers speak.
Mahatma Gandhi
#75. A people morally and intellectually equal to self-government must also be equal in self-defence.
Jefferson Davis
#76. Self-government requires qualities of self-denial and restraint.
John F. Kennedy
#77. I have very little experience of self-government. In fact, I am one of the most governed people in the world.
Prince Philip
#78. The creative project of self-government - hard and frustrating but necessary - is to produce that political commonwealth that changes over time, that can change sometimes by the minute, if circumstances intervene.
Charlie Pierce
#79. 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
#80. It is the function of God Rama to destroy evil, wherever it occurs and it is equally the function of God Rama to give to his devotees like Bibhishana a free charter of irrevocable self-government.
Mahatma Gandhi
#81. There is some who say that perhaps freedom is not universal. Maybe it's only Western people that can self-govern. Maybe it's only, you know, white-guy Methodists who are capable of self-government. I reject that notion.
George W. Bush
#82. If the supranationalist vision of the European project prevails, democracy and self-government will steadily be eroded in the vain pursuit of an unachievable world peace.
Todd Huizinga
#83. The master not only governs the slave without his consent, but he governs him by a set of rules altogether different from those which he prescribes for himself. Allow ALL the governed an
equal voice in the government, and that, and that only, is self-government.
Abraham Lincoln
#84. Democracy is direct self-government over all the people, for all the people, by all the people.
Theodore Parker
#85. People who cannot restrain their own baser instincts, who cannot treat one another with civility, are not capable of self-government ... without virtue, a society can be ruled only by fear, a truth that tyrants understand all too well
Charles W. Colson
#86. By itself, partyism is not the most serious threat to democratic self-government. But if it decreases government's ability to solve serious problems, then it has concrete and potentially catastrophic consequences for people's lives. I
Cass R. Sunstein
#87. The tendencies of the times favor the idea of self-government, and leave the individual, for all code, to the rewards and penalties of his own constitution, which work with more energy than we believe, whilst we depend on artificial restraints.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#88. I have so much confidence in the good sense of man, and his qualifications for self-government, that I am never afraid of the issue where reason is left free to exert her force.
Thomas Jefferson
#89. Self government is our right, a thing born to us at birth a thing no more to be doled out to us by another people then the right to life itself then the right to feel the sun or smell the flowers or to love our kind.
Roger Casement
#90. Adams understood that the secret to self-government is that the people must themselves be self-governing, which is to say they must be motivated by something beyond the law.
Eric Metaxas
#91. A true libertarian supports free enterprise, opposes big business; supports local self-government, opposes the nation-state; supports the National Rifle Association, opposes the Pentagon.
Edward Abbey
#92. The Philippines are ours forever. They are not capable of self- government. How could they be? They are not a self-governing race.
Albert J. Beveridge
#93. Ignorance and bigotry, like other insanities, are incapable of self-government.
Thomas Jefferson
#94. 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
#96. He became another data point in the American experiment of self-government, an experiment statistically skewed from the outset, because it wasn't the people with sociable genes who fled the crowded Old World for the new continent; it was the people who didn't get along well with others.
Jonathan Franzen
#98. Democracy, the practice of self-government, is a covenant among free men to respect the rights and liberties of their fellows.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#99. Anything that grows is, by definition, alive. Washington, D.C. was no exception. As a living organism, the Federal Government's number one job was self-preservation. Any threat to its existence had to be dealt with.
Brad Thor
#100. A timeline for bringing U.S. troops home that is negotiated with the Iraqi government would also boost the Iraqi government's legitimacy and claim to self-rule, and force the Iraqi government to take responsibility for itself and its citizens.
Peter DeFazio
