Top 100 The Welfare State Quotes
#1. The welfare state has always been judged by its good intentions, rather than its bad results.
Thomas Sowell
#2. In various European countries, it is increasingly common for young men to live with their parents into their 30s and even longer. Why not? In the welfare state, there is no shame in doing so.
Dennis Prager
#3. The welfare state is collapsing all around us. There are people that realize that we can't go on this way, but I'm not sure how many people realize how close we are to the collapse of the U.S. financial system.
Rush Limbaugh
#4. We must recognize that personal freedoms diminish as the welfare state grows. The price of more and more public programs is less and less private freedom.
Caspar Weinberger
#5. Over time, the welfare state has become dysfunctional in a surprising way. But in a way it became a victim of its own success: It became so successful at prolonging life, that it becomes financially unsustainable, unless you make major changes to things like retirement ages.
Niall Ferguson
#6. The black family survived centuries of slavery and generations of Jim Crow, but it has disintegrated in the wake of the liberals' expansion of the welfare state.
Thomas Sowell
#7. Still, there is space for this secular movement that has become frustrated with the liberal experience. In my opinion, there is a need for an effort that helps he establishment of social justice while taking into consideration all the qualifications and reservations against the welfare state.
Samir Kassir
#8. And here we encounter the seeds of government disaster and collapse - the kind that wrecked ancient Rome and every other civilization that allowed a sociopolitical monster called the welfare state to exist.
Barry Goldwater
#9. An indictment of entitlements has to focus on the huge 'social wealth' that the welfare state creates at the stroke of the pen. Yet statistical tests of the effects of welfare spending on employment yield erratic results.
Edmund Phelps
#10. The welfare state may be well-intentioned, but it is a Ponzi scheme
Dennis Prager
#11. Bush has legitimized a huge expansion of the welfare state, liberalizing immigration, and using force for democratization abroad. All the next Democratic president has to do to finish Bush's hard work is to raise taxes to pay for it all.
Andrew Sullivan
#12. The Welfare State is merely a method for transforming the market economy step by step into socialism.
Ludwig Von Mises
#13. The welfare state has bred a generation of obnoxious, drug-addled criminals and ne'er-do-wells. It has also, incidentally, burdened what was once the world's biggest, most dynamic economy with the dead weight of an obstructive and vastly expensive state machine.
Martin Durkin
#14. The welfare state is not really about the welfare of the masses. It is about the egos of the elites.
Thomas Sowell
#15. The welfare state is the bankruptcy law for workers
Ha-Joon Chang
#17. Socialism is the gradual and less violent form of communism, and socialist is the project of the European Union, which was born in Maastricht in 1992. The intent was to save socialism in Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the predictable bankruptcy of the welfare state in the West as well.
Vladimir Bukovsky
#18. Compassion is good but politicians have turned compassion into the welfare state.
Thomas Sowell
#19. Modern economics and the welfare state borrowed heavily on the future.
Gregory Benford
#20. This, by the way, is the welfare state in action: Its a whole bunch of special interest groups screwing consumers and taxpayers, and making them think they're really benefiting.
Murray Rothbard
#21. Healthcare is the cornerstone of the socialist state. It is the crown jewel of the welfare state.
Monica Crowley
#22. There are people who believe in expanding the welfare state across the spectrum of races and ethnicities and creeds.
Jeb Bush
#23. [There] are people who make a complete and utter mockery of 'democracy' and 'equality' - they're the casualties of the primitive rules of competition which run our society, and the welfare state just keeps them alive. That's all.
Michael Palin
#24. History, well taught, is the demythologising of the past ... Take any important issue of our time - Northern Ireland, Nuclear Disarmament, Race, The Welfare State, South Africa - and it becomes impossible to seriously confront any of them without understanding their historical background.
Alan Bullock
#25. Throughout history, politicians have used other people's property to buy themselves power. That is the primary achievement of the welfare state.
James Bovard
#26. Under both the welfare state and communism, the responsibility for the welfare, security, and prosperity of the people is presumed to rest with the central government.
Leonard Read
#27. The fundamental fact in the lives of the poor in most parts of America is that the wages of common labor are far below the benefits of AFDC, Medicaid, food stamps, public housing, public defenders, leisure time and all the other goods and services of the welfare state.
George Gilder
#28. If we conservatives "of color" refuse to promote the welfare state, unfettered abortion, affirmative action, and massive immigration, we are guilty of "selling out.
Michelle Malkin
#29. The problem of how we finance the welfare state should not obscure a separate issue: if each person thinks he has an inalienable right to welfare, no matter what happens to the world, that's not equity, it's just creating a society where you can't ask anything of people.
Jacques Delors
#30. The Welfare State, which begun in Imperial Germany for the truly indigent and disabled, has now become "everybody's entitlement" and an increasing burden on those who produce.
Peter Drucker
#31. 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
#32. The stark truth is that as long as the welfare state makes it possible for young women - or teenage girls - to have children without a husband and survive without a job, out-of-wedlock births will remain ruinously high, and the inner city will continue to be marked by crime, poverty, and despair.
David Boaz
#33. Yet, while producing increasingly selfish people, the mantra of the Left, and therefore of the universities and the media, has been for generations that capitalism and the free market, not the welfare state, produces selfish people.
Dennis Prager
#34. The welfare state creates its own victim/client constituency. By making individuals free and independent, we reduce the need for 'charity' to those truly needy citizens what we can certainly afford to help through real charity.
Grover Norquist
#35. Charities should not become the junior partner in the welfare state; whether or not they provide services funded by Government or, indeed, receive grants from Government, they must remain independent and focused on their mission.
William Shawcross
#36. Such terms as communism, socialism, Fabianism, the welfare state, Nazism, fascism, state interventionism, egalitarianism, the planned economy, the New Deal, the Fair Deal, the New Frontier are simply different labels for much the same thing.
Leonard Read
#37. Democrats are firm believers in the welfare state for their own constituents, whether that's a crack addict mother of five or a Wall Street banker.
Ann Coulter
#38. Thatcher had broken the miners' union, all but crushed the Labour Party, dramatically cut back the welfare state, even flirted with a poll tax. In the circles I ran in, Reagan was mocked as a childish dolt. Thatcher was despised.
Jon Weisman
#39. The welfare state shields people from the consequences of their own mistakes, allowing irresponsibility to continue and to flourish among ever wider circles of people.
Thomas Sowell
#40. There are no dead-end jobs. There are no dead-end jobs. There are only dead-end people. Our current social philosophy, and the welfare state apparatus based on it, are creating more dead-end people.
Thomas Sowell
#41. The welfare state is an assault on families.
Larry Elder
#42. What we're putting forward is the most radical reform of the welfare state ... for 60 years. I think it will have a transformative effect in making sure that everyone is better off in work and better off working rather than on benefits.
David Cameron
#43. I believe that the Welfare State redistributes poverty and reduces income. As Karl Kraus once said of psychoanalysis, the Welfare State is the disease which it purports to cure.
Arnold Kling
#44. I'm not going to be known as the Sinn Fein Minister who did the bidding of a Tory administration which is focused on decimating the welfare state.
Martin McGuinness
#45. The welfare state inhibits the maturation of its young citizens into responsible adults
Dennis Prager
#46. The welfare state is an enemy of private property. The excessive taxation used to support the welfare state is extremely dangerous.
Charles A. Murray
#47. Coercion is as much the tool of the welfare state as it is of communism. The programs and edicts of both are backed by the police force. All of us know this to be true under communism, but it is equally true under our own brand of welfare statism.
Leonard Read
#48. 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
#49. The Convention probably foresaw what it has been a principal aim of these papers to inculcate that the danger which most threatens our political welfare is, that the state governments will finally sap the foundations of the Union.
Alexander Hamilton
#50. The United States are a political state, or organized society, whose end is government, for the security, welfare, and happiness of all who live under its protection.
William H. Seward
#51. Man has throughout the ages been seeking something beyond himself, beyond material welfare - something we call truth or God or reality, a timeless state - something that cannot be disturbed by circumstances, by thought or by human corruption.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
#52. American critics of welfare statism are often surprised to learn that countries like West Germany, with a much more comprehensive welfare state and a statistically larger public sector, have fewer government employees per capita than the United States does.
Robert Kuttner
#53. No society is healthy which tells its members to take no thought of the morrow because the state underwrites their future.
Richard M. Weaver
#54. Our expensive welfare state is fueled by the destructive notion that 'greed' is when you want to keep your own money but 'compassion' is when you want to take somebody else's.
Lawrence Reed
#55. "Perfection of means and confusion of goals seem to characterize our age. If we desire sincerely and passionately the safety, the welfare and the free development of the talents of all men, we shall not be in want of the means to approach such a state."
Albert Einstein
#56. P4- no amount of dollars can remove the inherent destructiveness off welfare institutions once the professional hierarchies off these have convinced society that their ministrations are morally necessary.
Ivan Illich
#57. There's no conflict between the social-welfare state and open markets.
Gerhard Schroder
#58. In the present State of America, our welfare and prosperity depend upon the cultivation of our lands and turning the produce of them to the best advantage.
George Washington
#59. I think doctors care very deeply about their patients, but when they organize into the AMA, their responsibility is to the welfare of doctors, and quite often, these lobbying groups are the only ones that are heard in the state capitols and in the capitol of our country.
Jimmy Carter
#60. Gradually, he didn't doubt, the world would calm down into a gigantic welfare state devoted to sporting, cultural and sexual exchange, with the accepted international currency being items of hifi equipment.
Julian Barnes
#61. Not since the days of slavery have there been so many people who feel entitled to what other people have produced as there are in the modern welfare state, whether in Western Europe or on this side of the Atlantic.
Thomas Sowell
#62. The secret teaching was the bodhisattva ideal, to live for others, for the welfare of all beings. That's enlightenment, not some flashy state of luminosity.
Frederick Lenz
#63. I am a very instinctive Conservative. I have created a welfare system where it pays to work. I have created independent schools within the state sector bringing excellence to children wherever they are.
David Cameron
#64. The 1935 Social Security Act established 65 as the age of eligibility for payouts. But welfare state politics quickly becomes a bidding war, enriching the menu of benefits, so in 1956 Congress entitled women to collect benefits at 62, extending the entitlement to men in 1961.
George Will
#65. Welfare culture is bad not just because, as in Europe, it's bankrupting the state, but because it enfeebles the citizenry, it erodes self-reliance and resourcefulness.
Mark Steyn
#66. The goal and meaning of individual life (which is the only real life) no longer lie in individual development but in the policy of the State, which is thrust upon the individual from outside and consists in the execution of an abstract idea which ultimately tends to attract all life to itself.
C. G. Jung
#67. We are living in a highly organized state of socialism. The state is all; the individual is of importance only as he contributes to the welfare of the state. His property is only his as the state does not need it. He must hold his life and his possessions at the call of the state.
Bernard Baruch
#68. In the 1880s, people all over the world looked to America for inspiration. Its very existence was proof that it was possible to have a relatively free and peaceful country. No income tax, no foreign wars, no welfare state, no intrusions on civil liberties.
Harry Browne
#69. The natural tendency of the state is inflation. This statement will shock those accustomed to viewing the state as a committee of the whole nation ardently dispensing the general welfare, but I think it nonetheless true.
Murray Rothbard
#70. Canada is a Northern European welfare state in the worst sense of the term, and very proud of it
Stephen Harper
#71. There are jobs that American citizens will not do. We can talk about why that is. We can talk about how our welfare state is broken, how we encourage people not to work, but that doesn't help the farmer pick his peaches this summer.
Mick Mulvaney
#72. The Oscar Wilde of Welfare State gentility.
Joe Orton
#73. It's philanthropy, but it's good politics, too. Mighty good politics. The poor are some of the most grateful people in the world. George Washington Plunkett.
H.W. Brands
#74. To continue on the road we Americans have traveled for the past century is ultimately to deliver ourselves completely into the hands of an unlimited government. We can have a free society or a welfare state. We cannot have both.
Robert Higgs
#75. The difference between a welfare state and a totalitarian state is a matter of time.
Ayn Rand
#76. Here in England the welfare of the State depends on the conduct of our aristocracy.
Anthony Trollope
#77. I want to increase our spending on research and development by 25%. That's something the U.S. does very well. That dynamism alongside a welfare state in the European community - that's the synthesis I want to achieve.
Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero
#78. A democratic state is not proven by the welfare of the strong but by the welfare of the weak.
June Jordan
#79. The state is therefore everyone; the rules within the state are laws which safeguard the welfare of all and which must originate from the welfare of all.
Georg Buchner
#80. I entreat masters to live a good life and faithfully to instruct their scholars, especially that they may love God and learn to give themselves to knowledge, in order to promote His honour, the welfare of the state, and their own salvation, but not for the sake of avarice or the praise of man.
Jan Hus
#81. The passion for war is so intense that there is no undertaking so mad, or so injurious to the welfare of the State, that a man does not consider himself honored in defending it, at the risk of his life.
Alexis De Tocqueville
#82. The problem is that in America is that the nation state has been so weak when it comes to the history of big markets the history of big business in a way so we have a very weak welfare state compared to European nation states.
Cornel West
#83. The percentage of people qualifying for federal disability benefits because they are unable to work rose from 0.7 percent of the size of the labor force in 1960 to 5.3% in 2010.
Charles Murray
#84. The more men you make free, the more freedom is strengthened, and the more men you give an interest in the welfare and safety of the State, the greater is the security of the State.
Frederick Douglass
#85. If we could tax Americans' cognitive dissonance we could balance the budget. The American people want all kinds of incompatible things, they're human beings, and they want high services, low taxes, and an omnipresent, omniprominent welfare state.
George F. Will
#86. Every state of welfare, every feeling of satisfaction, is negative in its character; that is to say, it consists in freedom from pain, which is the positive element of existence.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#87. The biggest and most deadly 'tax' rate on the poor comes from a loss of various welfare state benefits - food stamps, housing subsidies and the like - if their income goes up.
Thomas Sowell
#88. the American West quietly became the first and most durable example of the modern welfare state. The
Marc Reisner
#89. Children need love and discipline. They need mothers and fathers. A welfare check is not a husband. The state is not a father.
Rush Limbaugh
#90. Only a system of state-controlled schools can be free to teach whatever the welfare of the State may demand.
Ellwood Patterson Cubberley
#91. You can either have individual liberty, or dependence on the government. One is designed to undo the other.
A.E. Samaan
#92. Post-national, welfare-state, cooperative, pacific Europe was not born of the optimistic, ambitious, forward-looking project imagined in fond retrospect by today's Euro-idealists. It was the insecure child of anxiety.
Tony Judt
#93. There was no welfare state, and people had to rely mainly on the Poor Law - that was all the state provided. It was very degrading, very humiliating. And there was a means test for receiving poor relief.
Barbara Castle
#94. The more people who are dependent on government handouts, the more votes the left can depend on for an ever-expanding welfare state.
Thomas Sowell
#96. Our upside down welfare state is socialism for the rich, free enterprise for the poor.
William O. Douglas
#97. But now I understand something more fully that I once only understood abstractly. I see how utterly ridiculous it is to think that the state can be the right means to help those who are poor or living at the margins of society. The state is their enemy, as it is for everyone else.
Jeffrey Tucker
#98. The future of Norway isn't about competing on being the cheapest but the most innovative. We have an expensive welfare state, and the only answer to continue that way is to become more competitive, especially on knowledge.
Erna Solberg
#99. In spite of its glowing talk about the welfare of the masses, Communism's methods and philosophy strip man of his dignity and worth, leaving him as little more than a depersonalized cog in the ever-turning wheel of the state.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#100. Free enterprise, [is] a term that refers, in practice, to a system of public subsidy and private profit, with massive government intervention in the economy to maintain a welfare state for the rich.
Noam Chomsky
