17 Quotes Tagged: Government

With the hard truth in mind, I venture to suggest the corpus of English and American laws – for the two arise for the most pat from the common root of belief and experience - cannot endure forever unless it is laminated by the spirit that void it in the beginning: that is, by religion, and specifically by the Christian people. Certain oral prostates of Christian teaching have. been taken for granted, in the past, as the ground of justice. When courts of law ignore those postulates, we group in judicial darkness..

When a government puts forth its strength on the side of injustice, as ours to maintain Slavery and kill the liberators of the slave, it reveals itself a merely brute force, or worse, a demoniacal force. It is the head of the Plug Uglies.

It's all very well to run around saying regulation is bad, get the government off our backs, etc. Of course our lives are regulated. When you come to a stop sign, you stop; if you want to go fishing, you get a license; if you want to shoot ducks, you can shoot only three ducks. The alternative is dead bodies at the intersection, no fish, and no ducks. OK?

(Getting Control of the Frontier, Gainsville Sun, March 22, 1995)

Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it.

What is it to be free of King George and continue to be the slaves of King Prejudice? What is it to be born free and not to live free?

What is called politics is comparatively something so superficial and inhuman, that, practically, I have never fairly recognized that it concerns me at all.

A reminder that the job of the government is to deliver Peace and Prosperity.

And therefore I would say that the first thing to do is to realize that governments, all governments, at least on occasion, lie. And some of them do it all the time - some of them do it only every second statement - but, by and large, governments distort the facts in order to remain in office.

A government run by professionals is like a form or a trading house run by back office &support people. But firms go bust, govs expand.

What do ye want to hear, ye puling infants? A trumpet-sound that would train you up to mankind, or a nurse's lullaby? The preachers and the lecturers deal with men of straw, as they are men of straw themselves. Why, a free-spoken man, of sound lungs, cannot draw a long breath without causing your rotten institutions to come toppling down by the vacuum he makes. Your church is a baby-house made of blocks, and so of the state.

A distinguished clergyman told me that he chose the profession of a clergyman, because it afforded the most leisure for literary pursuits. I would recommend to him the profession of a Governor.

Man and his affairs, church and state and school, trade and commerce, and manufactures and agriculture, even politics, the most alarming of them all, —I am pleased to see how little space they occupy in the landscape.

One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.

The character inherent in the American people has done all that has been accomplished; and it would have done somewhat more, if the government had not sometimes got in its way.

Let every man make known what kind of government would command his respect, and that will be one step toward obtaining it.