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.

A candidate is not going to suddenly change once they get into office. Just the opposite, in fact. Because the minute that individual takes that oath, they are under the hottest, harshest light there is. And there is no way to hide who they really are.

It’s not proper for the government to intrude too thoroughly into the domain of the family. It’s inappropriate.

Economic freedom cannot be sacrificed if political freedom is to be preserved.

Love has reasons which reason cannot understand.

Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.

Why a four-year-old child could understand this report. Run out and find me a four-year-old child. I can’t make head nor tail out of it.

The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only object of good government.

Now I am older, I understand we have to accept who we are.

If… many influential people have failed to understand, or have just forgotten, what we were up against in the Cold War and how we overcame it, they are not going to be capable of securing, let alone enlarging, the gains that liberty has made.

In general, the art of government consists of taking as much money as possible from one class of citizens to give to another.

We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.

Governments regard their own citizens as their main enemy, and they have to be – protect themselves. That’s why you have state secret laws. Citizens are not supposed to know what their government is doing to them.

Don’t ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up.

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

Act that your principle of action might safely be made a law for the whole world.

The artist forges himself to the others, midway between the beauty he cannot do without and the community he cannot tear himself away from. That is why true artists scorn nothing: they are obliged to understand rather than to judge.

2018 is an incredibly important election year, not just with the important midterms here in the U.S., but you just had the Mexican elections. You have Brazil. You have India coming up at the beginning of next year. There’s an assortment of elections around the EU. We’re very serious about this. We know that we need to get this right.

When I understand myself, I understand you, and out of that understanding comes love.

Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.

For every benefit you receive a tax is levied.

Still and all, why bother? Here’s my answer. Many people need desperately to receive this message: I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.

Government does not create wealth. The major role for the government is to create an environment where people take risks to expand the job rate in the United States.

He who does not understand your silence will probably not understand your words.

I do not have much patience with a thing of beauty that must be explained to be understood. If it does need additional interpretation by someone other than the creator, then I question whether it has fulfilled its purpose.

So long as governments set the example of killing their enemies, private individuals will occasionally kill theirs.

If you’re doing a biography, you try to stay as accurate as possible to reality. But you really don’t know what was going on in the person’s mind. You just know what was going on in the minds of people around him.

Elections should be held on April 16th- the day after we pay our income taxes. That is one of the few things that might discourage politicians from being big spenders.

It is a vain hope to make people happy by politics.

Truth is so rare that it is delightful to tell it.

I’m no longer just a candidate. I’m the President. I know what it means to send young Americans into battle, for I have held in my arms the mothers and fathers of those who didn’t return. I’ve shared the pain of families who’ve lost their homes, and the frustration of workers who’ve lost their jobs.

The objective I propose is quite simple to state: to foster the infrastructure of democracy – the system of a free press, unions, political parties, universities – which allows a people to choose their own way to develop their own culture, to reconcile their own differences through peaceful means.

Most states in the union where the death penalty is theoretically on the books don’t have executions.

He who exercises government by means of his virtue may be compared to the north polar star, which keeps its place and all the stars turn towards it.

He that will believe only what he can fully comprehend must have a long head or a very short creed.

Technique is really personality. That is the reason why the artist cannot teach it, why the pupil cannot learn it, and why the aesthetic critic can understand it.

Government exists to protect us from each other. Where government has gone beyond its limits is in deciding to protect us from ourselves.

Concentration of wealth yields concentration of political power. And concentration of political power gives rise to legislation that increases and accelerates the cycle.

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

It’s a rather rude gesture, but at least it’s clear what you mean.

Nobody will ever deprive the American people of the right to vote except the American people themselves and the only way they could do this is by not voting.

We’re always, by the way, in fundamental physics, always trying to investigate those things in which we don’t understand the conclusions. After we’ve checked them enough, we’re okay.

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.

I’d like to believe that the people that have supported me in my work or identified with me in films, the people that feel they know me, they do and they don’t have misconceptions – they understand. I believe that.

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.

Antitrust is the way that the government promotes markets when there are market failures. It has nothing to do with the idea of free information.

It is too late to be studying Hebrew; it is more important to understand even the slang of today.

The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.

Instead of judging people, we need to pray.

Ours is a nation of laws: of citizens who live under them and for the citizens who enforce them. So, to a community in Ferguson that is rightly hurting and looking for answers, let me call once again for us to seek some understanding rather than simply holler at each other. Let’s seek to heal rather than to wound each other.

Good governance with good intentions is the hallmark of our government. Implementation with integrity is our core passion.

I was always very curious as a young man about why older writers who I met seemed so indifferent to what was going on, whereas I, in my 20s, was reading everything. Everything seemed important. But they were only interested in the writers they admired when they were young, and I didn’t understand it then, but now, now I understand it.

At first when I heard about climate change, I was a climate denier. I didn’t think it was happening. Because if there really was an existential crisis like that, that would threaten our civilisation, we wouldn’t be focusing on anything else. That would be our first priority. So I didn’t understand how that added up.

Suit the action to the word, the word to the action.

Transparency at the MSRB is dubious with data downloads too costly for all but the Vanguards of the world.

It’s time to fundamentally change the way that we do business in Washington. To help build a new foundation for the 21st century, we need to reform our government so that it is more efficient, more transparent, and more creative. That will demand new thinking and a new sense of responsibility for every dollar that is spent.

The highest form of ignorance is when you reject something you don’t know anything about.

Constitutions should consist only of general provisions; the reason is that they must necessarily be permanent, and that they cannot calculate for the possible change of things.

Democracy passes into despotism.

Concede that the new government of Louisiana is only to what it should be, as the egg is to the fowl; we shall sooner have the fowl by hatching the egg than by smashing it.

A man never tells you anything until you contradict him.