The worst government is often the most moral. One composed of cynics is often very tolerant and humane. But when fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.
Henry Louis Mencken
You can never have a revolution in order to establish a democracy. You must have a democracy in order to have a revolution.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton
The state is a creation of nature and man is by nature a political animal.
Aristotle
No nation was ever ruined by trade.
Benjamin Franklin
The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.
Anatole France
Republics decline into democracies and democracies degenerate into despotisms.
Aristotle
No government can be long secure without formidable opposition.
Benjamin Disraeli
The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton
And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.
John F. Kennedy
I place economy among the first and most important republican virtues, and public debt as the greatest of the dangers to be feared. To preserve our independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt.
Thomas Jefferson
A precedent embalms a principle.
Benjamin Disraeli
Government can easily exist without laws, but law cannot exist without government.
Bertrand Russell
Under a government, which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.
Henry David Thoreau
It is error alone, which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.
Thomas Jefferson
Rather leave the crime of the guilty unpunished than condemn the innocent.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
I am sometimes a fox and sometimes a lion. The whole secret of government lies in knowing when to be the one or the other.
Napoleon
All violence, all that is dreary and repels, is not power, but the absence of power.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can ever turn it into a fact.
Honore de Balzac
The great questions of the day will not be settled by means of speeches and majority decisions but by iron and blood.
Otto von Bismarck
No nation has friends, only interests.
Charles de Gaulle
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
Voltaire
Democracy is a form of government that substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.
George Bernard Shaw
A multitude of laws in a country is like a great number of physicians, a sign of weakness and malady.
Voltaire
If you want total security, go to prison. There you`re fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking... is freedom.
Dwight David Eisenhower
People are difficult to govern because they have too much knowledge.
Lao Tzu
There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct or more uncertain in its success than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.
Niccolo Machiavelli
It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either.
Mark Twain
When people fear the government, there is tyranny. When government fears the people, there is liberty.
Thomas Paine
Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.
John F. Kennedy
Four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets.
Napoleon
Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
Henry Louis Mencken
All treaties between great states cease to be binding when they come in conflict with the struggle for existence.
Otto von Bismarck
Frequent punishments are always a sign of weakness or laziness on the part of a government.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
You can do anything with a bayonet except sit on it.
Napoleon
Secrecy, being an instrument of conspiracy, ought never to be the system of a regular government.
Jeremy Bentham
Everything secret degenerates; nothing is safe that does not bear discussion and publicity.
John Acton
Wherever you have an efficient government, you have a dictatorship.
Harry S. Truman
Every nation has the government it deserves.
Joseph de Maistre
The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.
Publius Cornelius Tacitus
A political man can have as his aim the realization of freedom, but he has no means to realize it other than through violence.
Jean Paul Sartre