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

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

Politically there were failures. And also on the personal level, there were tremendous failures.

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

As long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed.

The effect of liberty to individuals is that they may do what they please: we ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations.

If you look at ‚Blade Runner,‘ it’s been cut sixteen ways from Sunday, and there are all kinds of different versions of it.

Reputation is an idle and most false imposition; oft got without merit, and lost without deserving.

All government, of course, is against liberty.

No man will ever carry out of the Presidency the reputation which carried him into it.

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

You need to understand, if you take out a government, take out a regime, guess who becomes the government and regime and is responsible for the country? You are. So if you break it, you own it.

It’s clearly a budget. It’s got a lot of numbers in it.

When a new source of taxation is found it never means, in practice, that the old source is abandoned. It merely means that the politicians have two ways of milking the taxpayer where they had one before.

There can be no liberty unless there is economic liberty.

Liberty may be endangered by the abuse of liberty, but also by the abuse of power.

The government argues that First Amendment rights are outweighed by the need to prosecute those who transmit classified information and documents.

I seem to smell the stench of appeasement in the air.

It is much easier to be critical than to be correct.

We never fully grasp the import of any true statement until we have a clear notion of what the opposite untrue statement would be.

If men were angels, no government would be necessary.

Intellectuals are in a position to expose the lies of governments, to analyze actions according to their causes and motives and often hidden intentions.

Obamacare sucks, it can’t be fixed.

Whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice, neither, in my opinion, is safe.

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

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

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 can’t have special interests sitting shotgun. We gotta have middle class families up in front. We don’t mind the Republicans joining us. They can come for the ride, but they gotta sit in back.

Tyranny naturally arises out of democracy.

The false is nothing but an imitation of the true.

I believe that in every country the people themselves are more peaceably and liberally inclined than their governments.

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

The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.

Philosophy is common sense with big words.

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

One way to make sure crime doesn’t pay would be to let the government run it.

I found that the corridors of power in Delhi were littered with lobbies of various kinds.

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

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

The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.

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

Governments don’t control people like they used to.

Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.

There is no kind of dishonesty into which otherwise good people more easily and frequently fall than that of defrauding the government.

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

When I was president, I announced and I still maintain that I can live with Roe v. Wade. I did everything I possibly could as president under that ruling, which I don’t think ought to be changed, to minimize the need for abortions. I think every abortion is a result of a horrible series of errors on the part of people involved.

The method of nature: who could ever analyze it?

Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.

The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.

Protecting the rights of even the least individual among us is basically the only excuse the government has for even existing.

Government isn’t that good at rapid advancement of technology. It tends to be better at funding basic research. To have things take off, you’ve got to have commercial companies do it.

What do I think of Western civilization? I think it would be a very good idea.

I am not a televangelist.

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

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

The second office in the government is honorable and easy; the first is but a splendid misery.

We dissect failure a lot more than we dissect success.

The best government is a benevolent tyranny tempered by an occasional assassination.

You’ll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race.

An economist’s guess is liable to be as good as anybody else’s.

It’s actually very easy for democracy to disappear.