If the government ever imposes a tax on books – and I wouldn’t put it past them – I’m in dead trouble.

Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves are its only safe depositories.

I believe that a government has only one religion – India first. A government has only one holy book – our Constitution. A government has only one kind of devotion – towards nation.

I try to read as much as I can. I try to read an informative article every day. I try to stay read up on our world issues.

It is amazing that people who think we cannot afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, and medication somehow think that we can afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, medication and a government bureaucracy to administer it.

I think one of the great things about the United States has been our ability to maintain a distinction between our military and domestic law enforcement.

I don’t make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts.

Whether you come back by page or by the big screen, Hogwarts will always be there to welcome you home.

Sure there are dishonest men in local government. But there are dishonest men in national government too.

I am often asked if, when I was secretary, I had problems with foreign men. That is not who I had problems with, because I arrived in a very large plane that said United States of America. I had more problems with the men in our own government.

For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.

Writers and books are cheap dates, especially when you compare the cost of a book with a ticket to the opera – or an NHL game.

From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Someday I intend reading it.

Free government is the most difficult of all government. But it is everlastingly true that the plain people will make fewer mistakes than any other group of men, no matter how powerful.

The biggest problem that we have is that California is being run now by special interests. All of the politicians are not anymore making the moves for the people, but for special interests and we have to stop that.

Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people.

The CIA is made up of boys whose families sent them to Princeton but wouldn’t let them into the family brokerage business.

I believe that in every country the people themselves are more peaceably and liberally inclined than their governments.

My books are like water; those of the great geniuses are wine. (Fortunately) everybody drinks water.

Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.

We are all the President’s men.

Today, if you invent a better mousetrap, the government comes along with a better mouse.

In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.

The essence of Government is power; and power, lodged as it must be in human hands, will ever be liable to abuse.

Nothing turns out to be so oppressive and unjust as a feeble government.

The best books… are those that tell you what you know already.

If music be the food of love, play on.

I read to my kid, but I can’t stand reading.

Religion flourishes in greater purity, without than with the aid of Government.

The only superstition I have is that I must start a new book on the same day that I finish the last one, even if it’s just a few notes in a file. I dread not having work in progress.

If the machine of government is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law.

The mere brute pleasure of reading the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.

I was warped early by Ray Bradbury and Edgar Allan Poe. I was very fond of Franz Kafka.

A national debt, if it is not excessive, will be to us a national blessing.

I loved being Secretary of State, that’s probably evident to everyone who watched me.

A person who won’t read has no advantage over one who can’t read.

Shakespeare didn’t work at all for me.

I feel like I’m too busy writing history to read it.

It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations.

Here, sir, the people govern; here they act by their immediate representatives.

If it’s all instruction, you get annoyed with it and bored, and you stop reading. If it’s all entertainment, you read it quite quickly, your heart going pitty-pat, pitty-pat. But when you finish, that’s it. You’re not going to think about it much afterward, apart from the odd nightmare. You’re not going to read that book again.

You see the film, you might be entertained, and if it’s not a great film, it loses its power very quickly. I think even simply acceptable books stay with us a lot longer.

It is the duty of the President to propose and it is the privilege of the Congress to dispose.

Government is like a baby. An alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.

If you can’t read, it’s going to be hard to realize dreams.

It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.

Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.

Politics have no relation to morals.

Philanthropy should be taking much bigger risks that business. If these are easy problems, business and government can come in and solve them.

Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy – which many believe goes hand in hand with it – will be dead as well.

Thanks to my reading, I have never been caught flat-footed by any situation, never at a loss for how any problem has been addressed… It doesn’t give me all the answers, but it lights what is often a dark path ahead.

I was a very keen reader of science fiction, and during the time I was going to libraries, it was good, written by people who knew their science.

In my country we go to prison first and then become President.

While democracy in the long run is the most stable form of government, in the short run, it is among the most fragile.

The diversity in the faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to an uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties is the first object of government.

No man will ever carry out of the Presidency the reputation which carried him into it.

After you finish a book, you know, you’re dead. But no one knows you’re dead. All they see is the irresponsibility that comes in after the terrible responsibility of writing.

I don’t think the government should be in the trailer-park business. I don’t think they know how to run a trailer park.

If you can’t read, the only thing you can do is enjoy the pictures, not the whole story. Reading is the key to knowledge. Knowledge is the key to understanding. So read on, young man! Read on, young lady!

With all of their benefits, and there are many, one of the things I regret about e-books is that they have taken away the necessity of trawling foreign bookshops or the shelves of holiday houses to find something to read. I’ve come across gems and stinkers that way, and both can be fun.