Our country is now taking so steady a course as to show by what road it will pass to destruction, to wit: by consolidation of power first, and then corruption, its necessary consequence.

Greece needs to work on a cleaner image. It’s a big problem, as they have this reputation of being so corrupt.

Personally, I’d like to see more of our leaders take a technocratic approach to solving our biggest problems.

Most members of Congress are politicians. They’re bores.

Since I’m the president and Democrats have controlled the House and the Senate, it’s understandable that people are saying, you know, ‚What have you done?‘

We have the oldest written constitution still in force in the world, and it starts out with three words, ‚We, the people.‘

When a politician uses the word ‚folks,‘ we should brace ourselves for the deceit, or worse, that is coming.

If something can corrupt you, you’re corrupted already.

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

The income tax has made liars out of more Americans than golf.

Our object in the construction of the state is the greatest happiness of the whole, and not that of any one class.

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

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

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

Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.

The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.

That government is best which governs least.

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

This nuclear option is ultimately an example of the arrogance of power.

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.

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.

To some degree it matters who’s in office, but it matters more how much pressure they’re under from the public.

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.

Beware the hobby that eats.

The best government is that which teaches us to govern ourselves.

You have to have a certain realism that government is a pretty blunt instrument, and without the constant attention of highly qualified people with the right metrics, it will fall into not doing things very well.

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.

You know we’re going to control the insurance companies.

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

Whenever the speech is corrupted so is the mind.

Whenever a man has cast a longing eye on offices, a rottenness begins in his conduct.

I am concerned about the whole man. I am concerned about what the people, using their government as an instrument and a tool, can do toward building the whole man, which will mean a better society and a better world.

We the people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution.

We are the people our parents warned us about.

Never envy a man his lady. Behind it all lays a living hell.

Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning.

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

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

Be wary of the man who urges an action in which he himself incurs no risk.

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

Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. People have the right to expect that these wants will be provided for by this wisdom.

I love being in the United States Senate.

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

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 actually very easy for democracy to disappear.

I don’t think that a Justice should have uppermost in her mind, ‚A Democratic president appointed me, so I must leave to be sure that another Democratic president can appoint my successor.‘

President Assad, I worked with. I know him reasonably well, met with him a few times, and he’s a liar.

The FBI should not be a political body.

True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.

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

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.

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

I groan daily under a body of sin and corruption. Oh for the time when I shall drop this flesh, and be free from sin!

Democracy is the road to socialism.

There might be some serious fun in politics.

I don’t follow politics much.

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

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

A very large majority of the U.S. population is in favor of establishing diplomatic relations with Cuba and has been for a long time with some fluctuations. And even part of the business world is in favor of it, too. But the government won’t allow it.

I own that I am not a friend to a very energetic government. It is always oppressive.

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