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

No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size. Government programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth!

Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike.

We have the best government that money can buy.

My government is working for the common man. Our priority is the poor of the country. We want good governance through a dynamic and seamless government.

If the people cannot trust their government to do the job for which it exists – to protect them and to promote their common welfare – all else is lost.

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

A few years ago, the city council of Monza, Italy, barred pet owners from keeping goldfish in curved bowls… saying that it is cruel to keep a fish in a bowl with curved sides because, gazing out, the fish would have a distorted view of reality. But how do we know we have the true, undistorted picture of reality?

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

Younger scientists are extremely sensitive to the moral implications of all they do.

We must have government that builds stamina into communities and men. That makes men instead of mendicants.

Government is like a baby. An alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.

Governments are supposed to lie to their citizens.

Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.

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

The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.

If a person is successful, we imagine they are probably also ethical, conscientious and deserving of their good fortune. This obscures the fact that many people who get ahead have done so by doing less than moral actions, which they cleverly disguise from view.

For I can raise no money by vile means.

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

Only a man’s character is the real criterion of worth.

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

The humanists‘ replacement for religion: work really hard and somehow you’ll either save yourself or you’ll be immortal. Of course, that’s a total joke, and our progress is nothing. There may be progress in technology but there’s no ethical progress whatsoever.

Governments tend not to solve problems, only to rearrange them.

The pursuit of truth does not permit violence on one’s opponent.

Politics is not bean bags. It’s serious, tough stuff.

Corruption is one of the most common reasons I hear in views that criticize aid.

We are justified in enforcing good morals, for they belong to all mankind; but we are not justified in enforcing good manners, for good manners always mean our own manners.

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.

The number, the industry, and the morality of the priesthood, and the devotion of the people have been manifestly increased by the total separation of the church from the state.

If you must break the law, do it to seize power: in all other cases observe it.

In matters of conscience, the law of the majority has no place.

The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right.

Freedom of opinion can only exist when the government thinks itself secure.

There are no moral phenomena at all, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena.

Ancient Rome declined because it had a Senate, now what’s going to happen to us with both a House and a Senate?

We have got to change our ethics and our financial system and our whole way of understanding the world. It has to be a world in which people live rather than die; a sustainable world. It could be great.

A state arises, as I conceive, out of the needs of mankind; no one is self-sufficing, but all of us have many wants.

No cause justifies the deaths of innocent people.

It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it; consequently, the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning.

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.

Conscientious people are apt to see their duty in that which is the most painful course.

States are not moral agents, people are, and can impose moral standards on powerful institutions.

I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber of established religion.

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.

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

I pay attention to politics and technology.

A State without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.

Like Cato, give his little senate laws, and sit attentive to his own applause.

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.

It is a vain hope to make people happy by politics.

He who exercises government by means of his virtue may be compared to the north polar star, which keeps its place and all the stars turn towards it.

A constitution is the arrangement of magistracies in a state.

The rulers of the state are the only persons who ought to have the privilege of lying, either at home or abroad; they may be allowed to lie for the good of the state.

Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people.

If you believe that tax policy has nothing to do with the economy, then you’re pretty much like a rock, only dumber.

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

Never do anything against conscience even if the state demands it.

The United States is a nation of laws: badly written and randomly enforced.

A man is truly ethical only when he obeys the compulsion to help all life which he is able to assist, and shrinks from injuring anything that lives.

Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.

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