Government Quotes

The vast amount of waste and sheer stupidity in government - from the Pentagon to the Food and Drug Administration - could fill committee agendas for years.
– Tom Coburn
The value of government to the people it serves is in direct relationship to the interest citizens themselves display in the affairs of state.
– William Scranton
The United States government first learned of the diversion of the W-88 nuclear warhead design in late 1995.
– Charles Foster Bass
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
The union movement has been the best middle class job creating program that America has ever had, and it doesn't cost the government a dime.
– Andy Stern
The U.S. government knew that China wanted to acquire sensitive U.S. technology, and instead of implementing a policy to prevent them from acquiring the information, the government all but gave them an invitation to take our equipment and designs.
– Charles Foster Bass
The Tea Party was born out of the disgust many Americans felt early in the financial crisis upon learning that the federal government was even contemplating reducing the principal on some troubled mortgages.
– Mark Zandi
The sight of allegedly sophisticated politicians parroting complete tripe trivialises and demeans government and it has to be stopped. It's played a significant part in public disillusionment with politics and has led to the absurd situation where more people vote for 'Strictly Come Dancing' than voted in the general election.
– John Major
The Sandinista government became consumed with fighting a war of survival. They were up against the biggest superpower in the world.
– Bianca Jagger
The Right's view of government and the Left's view of big business are both correct.
– Robert Anton Wilson
The relationship between the government of the United States and social and indigenous movements has always been difficult. Not just in Bolivia but worldwide. We need to have bilateral relations characterized by mutual respect.
– Evo Morales
The reason this country continues its drift toward socialism and big nanny government is because too many people vote in the expectation of getting something for nothing, not because they have a concern for what is good for the country.
– Lyn Nofziger
The reality of split government puts a premium on creativity within the administration. President Obama needs to put the right people in charge of the agencies and then have them push the bounds of administrative power to change policy through those agencies. President Obama has a pretty good track record of this.
– Eliot Spitzer
The real truth is that the Obama administration is professional at bullying, as we have witnessed with ACORN at work during the presidential campaign. It seems to me they are sending down their bullies to create fist fights among average American citizens who don't want a government-run health care plan forced upon them.
– Jon Voight
The question is what will Mitt Romney do as president if his policy is simply to be hands off and let the government be made so small it can be drowned in a bathtub. In the 21st century global economy, no state alone has the ability to compete against China.
– Jennifer Granholm
The public sector certainly includes the Department of Labor. Those are jobs that are available. They are open and they are good paying jobs. The government as a whole has been actually retrenching under President Clinton's leadership.
– Alexis Herman
The president has declared that the debate over government-controlled health care is over. That will come as news to the millions of Americans who will elect Mitt Romney so we can repeal Obamacare.
– Paul Ryan
The only way people are going to change their car buying habits, and the only way government will get behind alternatively fueled vehicles, is if gasoline prices continue to go up.
– Alexandra Paul
The object of my relationship with Vietnam has been to heal the wounds that exist, particularly among our veterans, and to move forward with a positive relationship,... Apparently some in the Vietnamese government don't want to do that and that's their decision.
– Ho Chi Minh
The Negro revolution is controlled by foxy white liberals, by the Government itself. But the Black Revolution is controlled only by God.
– Malcolm X
The more expansive government is, the more perils people face in daily lives, be it from IRS agents or from child support services, or from other agencies that often have little or no legal restraints on their power.
– James Bovard
The minute health care becomes a huge, unwieldy, expensive government bureaucracy it's a permanent feature of life and there's nothing anyone can do about it.
– Mark Steyn
The measure of a man is not how great his faith is, but how great his love is. We must not let government programs disconnect our souls from each other.
– J. C. Watts
The liberals think government exists to fix what's wrong with America. They find fault with our Constitution, our economic model and our core values. We disagree with the premise of their argument. We believe there's nothing wrong with America that an extra dose of freedom won't cure.
– Rick Perry
The kingdom of God is an order of government established by divine authority. It is the only legal government that can exist in any part of the universe.
– Orson Pratt
The invisible hand of the market always moves faster and better than the heavy hand of government.
– Mitt Romney
The greatest advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science and literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government.
– Milton Friedman
The government's view is that the best time to announce bad news, news that it doesn't want the public to dwell on is late on a Friday, when it will wind up in the Saturday papers, which if you were readers, then the week day editions. A holiday weekend is even better.
– Bob Schieffer
The government would be able to go to court with respect to newspaper articles, broadcast pieces and the like that they thought were bad or harmful or even against the government and try to block them.
– Floyd Abrams
The government should set a goal for a clean environment but not mandate how that goal should be implemented.
– Dixy Lee Ray
The government is not your salvation. The government is not your road to prosperity. Hard work, education will take you far beyond what any government program can ever promise.
– Mia Love
The government must pursue a course of complete neutrality toward religion.
– John Paul Stevens
The government needs to help those in need, but members of Congress shouldn't take advantage of the situation and use a national tragedy as an opportunity to spend taxpayer dollars on their pet projects.
– Chris Chocola
The government is also looking at further benefits including enhanced capital allowances the use of Tax Incremental Finance and extra help from UK Trade and Investment on inward investment and trade opportunities.
– Andy Sawford
The government has convinced parents that at some point it's no longer their responsibility. And in fact, they force them, in many respects, to turn their children over to the public education system and wrest control from them and block them out of participation of that. That has to change or education will not improve in this country.
– Rick Santorum
The government can still conduct clandestine searches of innocent people's private information such as library, medical, and financial records. This is wrong and should have been addressed in a true compromise.
– Jose Serrano
The future is not Big Government. Self-serving politicians. Powerful bureaucrats. This has been tried, tested throughout history. The result has always been disaster. President Obama, your agenda is not new. It's not change, and it's not hope.
– Rush Limbaugh
The foundations of a strong economy don't rest alone on the decisions of Chancellors or the spending programmes of government.
– George Osborne
The five different areas in which boys are in crisis - education jobs emotional health physical health and fatherlessness - are handled by different portions of the government.
– Warren Farrell
The first duty of government is to see that people have food, fuel, and clothes. The second, that they have means of moral and intellectual education.
– John Ruskin
The FHA's success provides strong evidence that government can and should play a role in the nation's mortgage finance system. It also demonstrates that although government intervention in the economy during the Great Recession was messy, things would have been a lot messier without it.
– Mark Zandi
The federal government... knows how to put a missile in someone's room half way around the world with technology. Why don't we use some of that technology to save some lives here in America?
– Michael Nutter
The Federal Government is exploiting public fear to redefine the relationship between the rulers and the American people.
– James Bovard
The fact is, if our primary legislative goals are to repeal and replace the health spending bill to end the bailouts cut spending and shrink the size and scope of government, the only way to do all these things it is to put someone in the White House who won't veto any of these things.
– Mitch McConnell
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
The essence of a government health care system - for people who have never lived under it and don't know - is waiting, waiting, waiting. You wait for everything. You wait for years for operations that are routine in America.
– Mark Steyn
The duty of government is to leave commerce to its own capital and credit as well as all other branches of business, protecting all in their legal pursuits, granting exclusive privileges to none.
– Andrew Jackson
The Diet was dissolved by a Reich Government decree.
– Fritz Sauckel
The design of Rhetoric is to remove those Prejudices that lie in the way of Truth, to Reduce the Passions to the Government of Reasons to place our Subject in a Right Light, and excite our Hearers to a due consideration of it.
– Mary Astell
The concept of active cooperation has taken the place of opposition to the new form of government and of dreamy resignation entranced with the beauty of times past.
– Gustav Stresemann
The Chinese government wants me to say that for many centuries Tibet has been part of China. Even if I make that statement, many people would just laugh. And my statement will not change past history. History is history.
– The Dalai Lama
The Chinese government is quickly losing its ideological legitimacy, maintain its rule with force, but cannot draw strength from the ideology of Marx and Mao.
– Steve Forbes
The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only object of good government.
– Thomas Jefferson
The best minds are not in government. If any were, business would steal them away.
– Ronald Reagan
The basis, the corner-stone of this Government, was the perfect equality of the free, sovereign, and independent States which made it.
– Robert Toombs
The banking collapse was caused, more than anything, by bad government policy and the total failure of bad regulation, rather than by greed.
– Nigel Farage
The balance between faith and reason is for the determination of each individual, and of the people as a whole, not of unauthorized government officials uttering impious humbug as they arbitrarily try to define that balance.
– Conrad Black
The average Nigerian person has come to reconcile himself with the fact that his or her social progress remain essentially in his or her hands in collaboration with other fellow Nigerians and not merely relying on what government alone could provide for him or her.
– Ibrahim Babangida
The Australian Government's decision to take on the dominant funding role for the entire public hospital system is designed to: end the blame game eliminate waste and to shoulder the funding burden of the rapidly rising health costs of the future.
– Kevin Rudd
The art of government is the organisation of idolatry.
– George Bernard Shaw
The American people are not just being taxed to death they're being taxed after death. But, no one should have to sell the life's work of a parent or a loved one just to pay the federal government.
– J. D. Hayworth
The American formula for creating business is not to have the government create business.
– John Sununu
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
Spending when the math's not there and the numbers aren't there and if they look in the social security trust fund, it's filled with IOUs because the government's been pilfering it for years on end. We have to do something. We have to start having this discussion.
– Ben Quayle
So you know, I think that the federal government, the Democrats, and President Obama are selling a lot of hope and change, but no delivery of any of those promises.
– Jan Brewer
So why am I facing a recall election? Simple: the big government union bosses from Washington want their money. They don't like the fact that I did something fundamentally pro-worker something that's truly about freedom.
– Scott Walker
So far as it depends on the course of this government, our relations of good will and friendship will be sedulously cultivated with all nations.
– John Tyler
Since the tragedies, the Department of Homeland Security was established to prevent terrorist attacks within the United States, and most importantly, to share intelligence information among government agencies and departments.
– Randy Forbes
Since the presidency of Ronald Reagan, conservatives have succeeded by adhering to a platform that rests firmly on three legs: smaller government, faith and family, and a strong national defense. These three legs do not merely represent a political coalition they are three necessary components of a strong and secure America.
– Frank Gaffney
Sharia has become an increasingly significant force in American capitalism, thanks to the embrace by Wall Street and the U.S. government of so-called Sharia-Compliant Finance. Indeed, this country's taxpayers now own the largest purveyor of sharia-compliant insurance products in the world: AIG.
– Frank Gaffney
Romney is right that the Obama vision is too centered on government. But his is too centered on the promotion of business and wealth creation at the expense of everything else.
– John Podhoretz
Research and development needs permanent tax credits to build the technology that spurs our growth. But no government programs alone can get America's students to study more science and math parents must push and help their children to meet this goal.
– Ernest Istook
Religion is of general and public concern, and on its support depend, in great measure, the peace and good order of government, the safety and happiness of the people.
– Samuel Chase
Rarely in modern times has there been such a revolution in commercial sentiment as occurred in 2008, or such a display in government and business of panic and helplessness.
– James Buchan
President Ford was a devoted, decent man of impeccable integrity who put service to his country before his own self interest. He helped heal our nation during a time of crisis, provided steady leadership and restored people's faith in the presidency and in government.
– Mark Udall
Poor people cannot rely on the government to come to help you in times of need. You have to get your education. Then nobody can control your destiny.
– Charles Barkley
Perhaps the fact that we have seen millions voting themselves into complete dependence on a tyrant has made our generation understand that to choose one's government is not necessarily to secure freedom.
– Friedrich August von Hayek
Perhaps religious conscience upsets the designs of those who feel that the highest wisdom and authority comes from government. But from the beginning, this nation trusted in God, not man. Religious liberty is the first freedom in our Constitution.
– Mitt Romney
People, not just reporters, are more interested in politics than in government, so the actual issues wouldn't be something that interested them.
– Calvin Trillin
People just want to hear some common sense... and I bring to bear the experience in local government and state government and national government - I was the first woman in history on the Senate Finance Committee - not to mention the diplomatic international experience.
– Carol Moseley Braun
People in Oklahoma don't wake up every morning wondering what the government is going to do for them.
– Mick Cornett
People don't trust the federal government as it relates to health care.
– Mike Conaway
People don't place their trust in government or company pension plans they have to be self-reliant.
– Scott Cook
People are rapidly losing hope and trust. They believe their government has been captured by special interests and no longer cares about them, and they are right.
– Marcy Kaptur
Past experience with fiscal austerity at home and overseas strongly suggests that it is best for the economy's long-run performance to restrain government spending rather than raise taxes.
– Mark Zandi
Part of the reason that the government's fear mongering is succeeding is because so many people are so ignorant, that it is easier for government to frighten people in submission.
– James Bovard
Our markets have not achieved their great successes as a result of government fiat, but rather through efforts of competing interests working to meet the demands of investors and to fulfill the promises posed by advancing technology.
– Arthur Levitt
Our government shouldn't tell us where to travel and where not to travel.
– Jeff Flake
Our government is founded upon the intelligence of the people. I for one do not despair of the republic. I have great confidence in the virtue of the great majority of the people, and I cannot fear the result.
– Andrew Jackson
Our future cannot depend on the government alone. The ultimate solutions lie in the attitudes and the actions of the American people.
– Joe Biden
Our Founders warned against this. They said don't... that your liberty is only as secure as the people are. Because once they, um, get the ability to vote themselves entitlements from the largesse of the government, liberty is done freedom is over with. We were warned. We are there.
– Sharron Angle
Our founders got it right when they wrote in the Declaration of Independence that our rights come from nature and nature's God, not from government.
– Paul Ryan
One of the really positive things about minority government is that there is the necessity to broker policy positions. What happens is you get a hybrid of what a single party might do. And I don't think that is a bad thing.
– Kathleen Wynne
Of course there are critics who believe that no matter what we do, the Florida dream is over. They claim that we must accept the idea that inevitably our future is one of high taxes and big government.
– Marco Rubio
Now the main areas of higher education that still enjoy considerable financial support from government are subjects like engineering and science and the research ringfence which is the basic minimum to protect Britain's scientific competitiveness.
– Vince Cable
Nothing is more important in the preservation of peace than to secure among the great mass of the people living under constitutional government a just conception of the rights which their nation has against others and of the duties their nation owes to others.
– Elihu Root
Not only our future economic soundness but the very soundness of our democratic institutions depends on the determination of our government to give employment to idle men.
– Franklin D. Roosevelt
Non-disclosure in the Internet Age is quickly perceived as a breach of trust. Government, corporations and each of us as individuals must recalibrate how we live and share our lives appropriate to the information now available and the expectations of others.
– Simon Mainwaring
No power of government ought to be employed in the endeavor to establish any system or article of belief on the subject of religion.
– Jeremy Bentham
No one should negotiate their dreams. Dreams must be free to fly high. No government, no legislature, has a right to limit your dreams. You should never agree to surrender your dreams.
– Jesse Jackson