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

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.

For other nations, utopia is a blessed past never to be recovered; for Americans it is just beyond the horizon.

But do I think that our actions in anyway violate the War Powers Resolution, the answer is no.

No public man can be just a little crooked.

When you decide to get involved in a military operation in a place like Syria, you’ve got to be prepared, as we learned from Iraq and Afghanistan, to become the government, and I’m not sure any country, either the United States or I don’t hear of anyone else, who’s willing to take on that responsibility.

The basis of our political system is the right of the people to make and to alter their constitutions of government.

Where there is a free government, and the people make their own laws by their representatives, I see no injustice in their obliging one another to take their own paper money.

One thing you gotta know about me is I have absolutely no filter. I have no problem saying what the hell I think of someone.

My job is not to represent Washington to you, but to represent you to Washington.

If I’d written all the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600 people – including me – would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.

Our character is what we do when we think no one is looking.

To conceal anything from those to whom I am attached, is not in my nature. I can never close my lips where I have opened my heart.

It’s good sportsmanship to not pick up lost golf balls while they are still rolling.

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

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.

No one ever doubts that I mean what I say. The problem is I sometimes say all that I mean.

There will be no whitewash in the White House.

I don’t have any secrets I need kept any more.

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

We cannot continue to rely only on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives that we’ve set. We’ve got to have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded.

Always prefer the plain direct word to the long, vague one. Don’t implement promises, but keep them.

Greece has been, in many ways, a partially dysfunctional society. For example, the wealthy barely pay taxes… to an extent, that’s true elsewhere, including the United States, but it’s been pretty extreme in Greece.

Scientists are not delinquents. Our work has changed the conditions in which men live, but the use made of these changes is the problem of governments, not of scientists.

The day-to-day making of policy is arguing all the time. You’re trying to get the right approach and the right answer, and there are moments that aren’t very pleasant. But in the end, you look at the overall product.

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

Tricks and treachery are the practice of fools, that don’t have brains enough to be honest.

Empire and liberty.

All government, indeed every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue, and every prudent act, is founded on compromise and barter.

Political necessities sometime turn out to be political mistakes.

Government’s first duty and highest obligation is public safety.

We tell lies, yet it is easy to show that lying is immoral.

One must not cheat anyone, not even the world of its victory.

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

Let’s be honest. Canada wasn’t ever cool.

The inquiry constantly is what will please, not what will benefit the people. In such a government there can be nothing but temporary expedient, fickleness, and folly.

A person should not be too honest. Straight trees are cut first and honest people are screwed first.

Obamacare sucks, it can’t be fixed.

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.

I like policy. It’s why I decided to enter government. The other thing I like about government – you have good days, you have bad days, but you never have a boring day, and that’s important to me.

If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure – the relationship so secret and private compared with relations with men. Why not write about it truthfully?

Well, I thought the deal was, when you went to work for the government you weren’t supposed to make money!

For any young democracy, the most difficult but important step is burying the legacy of tyranny and establishing an economy and a government and institutions that abide by the rule of law. Every country faces challenges to the rule of law, including my own.

If the government ever imposes a tax on books – and I wouldn’t put it past them – I’m in dead trouble.

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.

If you look at U.S. history through religious history, there is very much a motif that shows the importance religion has played in the U.S. We’re a very religious country and it affects the way we look at various political issues.

Falsehood is cowardice, the truth courage.

No government ought to be without censors; and where the press is free no one ever will.

I change my mind a lot. I usually don’t agree with what I say very much. I’m an awful liar.

Politics I supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first.

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

I have been very happy in the House of Representatives.

To the living we owe respect, but to the dead we owe only the truth.

A Christian who does not pray for those who govern is not a good Christian.

‚Tis not enough your counsel still be true; Blunt truths more mischief than nice falsehoods do.

Every actual State is corrupt. Good men must not obey laws too well.

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.

I would not give half a guinea to live under one form of government other than another. It is of no moment to the happiness of an individual.

Every time I say something that’s extremely truthful out loud, it literally breaks the Internet.

When there is an income tax, the just man will pay more and the unjust less on the same amount of income.

If the machine of government is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law.