Not only our future economic soundness but the very soundness of our democratic institutions depends on the determination of our government to give employment to idle men.

If the present Congress errs in too much talking, how can it be otherwise in a body to which the people send one hundred and fifty lawyers, whose trade it is to question everything, yield nothing, and talk by the hour?

What is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?

Anger is wonderful. It keeps you going. I’m angry about bankers. About the government.

A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.

In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place, oblige it to control itself.

Liberty must be limited in order to be possessed.

If you make any money, the government shoves you in the creek once a year with it in your pockets, and all that don’t get wet you can keep.

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.

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

No man should be in politics unless he would honestly rather not be there.

When hiring somebody, I never ask to see a curriculum vitae. I feel that since I didn’t have one myself, it would be a bit presumptuous to ask to see anyone else’s.

I had very good support from Democrats and Republicans all throughout my administration. I had a very high batting average. We added more jobs per year in my four years than any other president since the Second World War.

Domestic policy can only defeat us; foreign policy can kill us.

Prosperous farmers mean more employment, more prosperity for the workers and the business men of every industrial area in the whole country.

We find ourselves under the government of a system of political institutions, conducing more essentially to the ends of civil and religious liberty, than any of which the history of former times tells us.

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.

Even if the politics needed doesn’t exist today, we still need to use our voices to make sure that the people in power are focused on the right things. Because this is a democracy, and in a democracy, people are the ones who run the country.

Which government is the best? The one that teaches us to govern ourselves.

Jobs are a centuries-old concept created during the Industrial Revolution. Despite the reality that we’re now deep in the Information Age, many people are studying for, or working at, or clinging to the Industrial Age idea of a safe, secure job.

It may be laid down as a primary position, and the basis of our system, that every Citizen who enjoys the protection of a Free Government, owes not only a proportion of his property, but even of his personal services to the defense of it.

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

Democracy is worth dying for, because it’s the most deeply honorable form of government ever devised by man.

This country has come to feel the same when Congress is in session as when the baby gets hold of a hammer.

I pay attention to politics and technology.

It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it; consequently, the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning.

Politics is not bean bags. It’s serious, tough stuff.

The art of government is the organisation of idolatry.

The economy’s always been the engine for our national security.

What do you think a stimulus is? It’s spending – that’s the whole point! Seriously.

Politicians love regulating. That’s part of the whole power structure.

Well, no one gives aid to Zimbabwe through the Mugabe government.

I do have a political agenda. It’s to have as few regulations as possible.

My family was mostly unemployed working class.

Law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress.

In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.

I do not believe that government should be in the business of telling women what they should do with their bodies.

The government of Israel doesn’t like the kinds of things I say, which puts them into the same category as every other government in the world.

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.

Government can provide opportunity. But opportunity means nothing unless people are prepared to seize it.

Hyperinflation can take virtually your entire life’s savings, without the government having to bother raising the official tax rate at all.

People forget… that we structured it so that the government, or the people, would be repaid with a really good rate of return. And as it turns out, that aspect of TARP, that’s what happened.

Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people.

I have no doubt but that the misery of the lower classes will be found to abate whenever the Government assumes a freer aspect and the laws favor a subdivision of Property.

A dictatorship would be a heck of a lot easier, there’s no question about it.

I don’t follow politics much.

The totalitarian, to me, is the enemy – the one that’s absolute, the one that wants control over the inside of your head, not just your actions and your taxes.

The Iranian government is undoubtedly a severe danger to its own population, but not beyond that.

What Washington needs is adult supervision.

Empire and liberty.

If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.

Democracy is the process by which people choose the man who’ll get the blame.

Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.

Don’t interfere with anything in the Constitution. That must be maintained, for it is the only safeguard of our liberties.

Democracy is when the indigent, and not the men of property, are the rulers.

I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time.

There will be no end to the troubles of states, or of humanity itself, till philosophers become kings in this world, or till those we now call kings and rulers really and truly become philosophers, and political power and philosophy thus come into the same hands.

Senator Kerry has been in Washington long enough to take both sides on just about every issue.

Government always finds a need for whatever money it gets.

How can we help President Obama?

Republics decline into democracies and democracies degenerate into despotisms.