Government Quotes and Quotations
The safety of the State is the highest law.
Experience teaches us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficient.
Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants.
Government is a trust, and the officers of the government are trustees; and both the trust and the trustees are created for the benefit of the people.
Though the people support the government the government should not support the people.
I think we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious.
The will of the people is the only legitimate foundation of any government, and to protect its free expression should be our first object.
Govern a great nation as you would cook a small fish. (Don't overdo it.)
No man is good enough to govern another man without that other's consent.
A house divided against itself cannot stand - I believe this government cannot endure permanently half-slave and half-free.
Every nation has the government that it deserves.
Democracy is direct self-government, over all the people, for all the people, by all the people.
Governments exist to protect the rights of minorities. The loved and the rich need no protection, - they have many friends and few enemies.
No man undertakes a trade he has not learned, even the meanest; yet every one thinks himself sufficiently qualified for the hardest of all trades - that of government.
It seems to me that government is like a pump, and what it pumps up is just what we are, a fair sample of the intellect, the ethics and the morals of the people, no better, no worse.
Themistocles said, "The Athenians govern the Greeks; I govern the Athenians; you, my wife, govern me; your son governs you."
The basis of our political systems is the right of the people to make and to alter their constitutions of government.