A popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce, or a tragedy, or perhaps both.

For any young democracy, the most difficult but important step is burying the legacy of tyranny and establishing an economy and a government and institutions that abide by the rule of law. Every country faces challenges to the rule of law, including my own.

Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.

If men were angels, no government would be necessary.

After the chaos and carnage of September 11th, it is not enough to serve our enemies with legal papers.

It sure is hell to be president.

As Bromberger observed, rules are understood to be elements of the computational systems that determine the sound and meaning of the infinite array of expressions of a language; the information so derived is accessed by other systems in language use.

I would not give half a guinea to live under one form of government other than another. It is of no moment to the happiness of an individual.

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

The difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that in a democracy you vote first and take orders later; in a dictatorship you don’t have to waste your time voting.

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.

About all I can say for the United States Senate is that it opens with a prayer and closes with an investigation.

If investments in banks fall, it is a tragedy, and people say, ‚What are we going to do?‘ but if people die of hunger, have nothing to eat or suffer from poor health, that’s nothing.

It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood.

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

Nobody wants to put the creditworthiness of the United States in jeopardy. Nobody wants to see the United States default. So we’ve got to seize this moment, and we have to seize it soon.

Be thankful we’re not getting all the government we’re paying for.

Government does not solve problems; it subsidizes them.

Here at home, when Americans were standing in long lines to give blood after the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, we squandered an obvious opportunity to make service a noble cause again, and rekindle an American spirit of community.

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

There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.

You can never have a revolution in order to establish a democracy. You must have a democracy in order to have a revolution.

Mankind, when left to themselves, are unfit for their own government.

When we meet real tragedy in life, we can react in two ways – either by losing hope and falling into self-destructive habits, or by using the challenge to find our inner strength. Thanks to the teachings of Buddha, I have been able to take this second way.

I think the notion that we have all the democracy that money can buy strays so far from what our democracy is supposed to be.

You can’t get a contemporary story about what is going on inside government, and how society sees itself, on American TV.

Governments tend not to solve problems, only to rearrange them.

All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.

All government, indeed every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue, and every prudent act, is founded on compromise and barter.

To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.

To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea.

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

How can we help President Obama?

Liberty must be limited in order to be possessed.

Now that the House of Commons is trying to become useful, it does a great deal of harm.

Artists have a responsibility to speak and to act when governments fail, and if we don’t do that, we really deserve the world we get.

Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear – kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor – with the cry of grave national emergency.

In ideal form of social control is an atomised collection of individuals focused on their own narrow concern, lacking the kinds of organisations in which they can gain information, develop and articulate their thoughts, and act constructively to achieve common ends.

Over grown military establishments are under any form of government inauspicious to liberty, and are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty.

For every benefit you receive a tax is levied.

If the people cannot trust their government to do the job for which it exists – to protect them and to promote their common welfare – all else is lost.

That government is best which governs least.

No government can help the destinies of people who insist in putting sectional and class consciousness ahead of general weal.

Nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced.

As a general rule, the most successful man in life is the man who has the best information.

I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.

A tragedy is a representation of an action that is whole and complete and of a certain magnitude. A whole is what has a beginning and middle and end.

I can hear you, the rest of the world can hear you and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.

One of the roles of the Presidency is to lead a political party. Having a President in office is usually a huge advantage to a party because it gives the party a mouthpiece and an advocate at the highest level.

I’m the president of the United States. I’m not the emperor of the United States.

When a nation is over-reliant on one or two commodities like oil or precious minerals, corrupt government ministers and their dodgy associates hoard profits and taxes instead of properly allocating them to schools and hospitals.

Democracy means government by the uneducated, while aristocracy means government by the badly educated.

Syntax, my lad. It has been restored to the highest place in the republic.

Withdrawal of American troops must be a unilateral act, as the invasion of Vietnam by the American government was a unilateral act in the first place.

The smarter the journalists are, the better off society is. For to a degree, people read the press to inform themselves – and the better the teacher, the better the student body.

Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.

It is not only the living who are killed in war.

We need to understand that we as citizens and as a government in any community throughout this country have no more important obligation than to educate those who are going to replace us.

As he was valiant, I honour him. But as he was ambitious, I slew him.

Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.

I have often thought that if a rational Fascist dictatorship were to exist, then it would choose the American system.