One of the peculiarities of Delhi is that the term ‚reform‘ is associated only with passing of laws in Parliament. In fact, the most important reforms are those needed, without new laws, at various level of the government, in work practices and procedures.

The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.

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

It is a virtual reflex for governments to plead security concerns when they undertake any controversial action, often as a pretext for something else.

We shouldn’t have to be burdened with all the technicalities that come up from time to time with shrewd, smart lawyers interpreting what the laws or what the Constitution may or may not say.

The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other peoples‘ money.

Political necessities sometime turn out to be political mistakes.

Each generation doubtless feels called upon to reform the world. Mine knows that it will not reform it, but its task is perhaps even greater. It consists in preventing the world from destroying itself.

Loyalty to the Nation all the time, loyalty to the Government when it deserves it.

I hope that a move toward clemency with Judge Afiuni would be a step towards the importance of maintaining a properly functioning justice system.

There’s no trick to being a humorist when you have the whole government working for you.

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.

Governments don’t control people like they used to.

When I took over as president, I studied the Constitution, and the more I studied it, the more I realised that it does not prevent the president of India from giving the nation a vision. So when I went and presented this vision in Parliament and in legislative assemblies; everyone welcomed it, irrespective of party affiliations.

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

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

If you believe in science, like I do, you believe that there are certain laws that are always obeyed.

Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it.

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.

In my view of the present aspect of affairs, there is no need of bloodshed and war. There is no necessity for it. I am not in favor of such a course, and I may say in advance, there will be no blood shed unless it be forced upon the government. The government will not use force unless force is used against it.

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.

The world is weary of statesmen whom democracy has degraded into politicians.

There might be some serious fun in politics.

In the 21st century, the countries that thrive will be the ones where citizens know their voices will be heard because the institutions are transparent.

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

A President needs political understanding to run the government, but he may be elected without it.

The people of God want pastors, not clergy acting like bureaucrats or government officials.

I played by the rules of politics as I found them.

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

Every family should have the right to spend their money, after tax, as they wish, and not as the government dictates. Let us extend choice, extend the will to choose and the chance to choose.

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

And I have no doubt that every new example will succeed, as every past one has done, in showing that religion and Government will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together.

A Bill of Rights is what the people are entitled to against every government, and what no just government should refuse, or rest on inference.

I have a very strict gun control policy: if there’s a gun around, I want to be in control of it.

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

Washington isn’t a city, it’s an abstraction.

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.

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.

Democracy is the road to socialism.

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.

If you have ten thousand regulations you destroy all respect for the law.

Ninety-nine percent of the men and women of the FBI… are just professionals. I don’t want Americans, if an FBI agent knocks on their door, to have to be worried about well, is he a Democrat or a Republican? He’s an FBI agent.

Politics are very much like war. We may even have to use poison gas at times.

Things in our country run in spite of government, not by aid of it.

Laws are silent in time of war.

On account of being a democracy and run by the people, we are the only nation in the world that has to keep a government four years, no matter what it does.

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

Ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad reputation.

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.

I like policy – call me a nerd.

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.

Government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth.

It is part of the general pattern of misguided policy that our country is now geared to an arms economy which was bred in an artificially induced psychosis of war hysteria and nurtured upon an incessant propaganda of fear.

The White House is the finest prison in the world.

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

The immigration issue is, I recognize, one that generates a lot of passion, but it does not make sense for us to want to push talent out.

Well, I have great respect for Senator Hirono.

The republican is the only form of government which is not eternally at open or secret war with the rights of mankind.

What we need to understand is that when traditions become laws, rules, obligations and expectations others put on us that we don’t want to fulfill, then they lose real meaning and steal the joy from our lives. And if we’re too religious, we won’t be able to be led by the Holy Spirit and enjoy an intimate relationship with Him.

A constitution is the arrangement of magistracies in a state.

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.