It is hard to feel individually responsible with respect to the invisible processes of a huge and distant government. – John Gardner
When government accepts responsibility for people, then people no longer take responsibility for themselves. – George Pataki
Morphine and state relief are the same. You go dopey, feel better and are worse off. – Martin H. Fischer (1879–1962)
Democracy is an abuse of statistics. – Jorge Luis Borges
No nation is fit to sit in judgment upon any other nation. – Woodrow Wilson
Information is the currency of democracy. – Thomas Jefferson
The government deficit is the difference between the amount of money the government spends and the amount it has the nerve to collect. – Sam Ewing
Better the occasional faults of a government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference. – Franklin D. Roosevelt
A Conservative government is an organised hypocrisy. – Benjamin Disraeli, 1845
Let the people think they govern, and they will be governed. – William Penn, Some Fruits of Solitude, 1693
Bureaus are extrusions from the body politic — they are pus. – Martin H. Fischer (1879–1962)
In the infancy of societies, the chiefs of the state shape its institutions; later the institutions shape the chiefs of state. – Baron de Montesquieu
The marvel of all history is the patience with which men and women submit to burdens unnecessarily laid upon them by their governments. – William E. Borah
The happiest thing that can be said about democracy… is that it is one of the few systems that has been willing to risk a long period of confusion and mixed purposes for the sake of giving man a chance to grow up in mind and responsibility. – H.A. Overstreet
Why has government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice, without constraint. – Alexander Hamilton
Democracy cannot flourish half rich and half poor, any more than it can flourish half free and half slave. – Felix G. Rohatyn, New York Times, 3 June 1987
You know why there are so many whitefish in the Yellowstone River? Because the Fish and Game people have never done anything to help them. – Russell Chatham, Silent Seasons, 1978
The People, though we think of a great entity when we use the word, means nothing more than so many millions of individual men. – James Bryce
To hear some men talk of the government, you would suppose that Congress was the law of gravitation, and kept the planets in their places. – Wendell Phillips, Orations, Speeches, Lectures and Letters
Democracy is an experiment, and the right of the majority to rule is no more inherent than the right of the minority to rule; and unless the majority represents sane, righteous, unselfish public sentiment, it has no inherent right. – William Allen White (Thanks, Bob)
