The government, whether state or central, is elected. That means we have a responsibility to elect the right kind of leaders.

For every benefit you receive a tax is levied.

Our defense is in the preservation of the spirit which prizes liberty as a heritage of all men, in all lands, everywhere. Destroy this spirit and you have planted the seeds of despotism around your own doors.

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’s easy being a humorist when you’ve got the whole government working for you.

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

Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.

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.

And now, of course this is another thing I didn’t count on, that now as the governor of the state of California, I am selling California worldwide. You see that? Selling.

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.

Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around.

Every family should have the right to spend their money, after tax, as they wish, and not as the government dictates. Let us extend choice, extend the will to choose and the chance to choose.

Being the only man in the household with my mom definitely helped me grow up fast.

The New Deal repudiation of democracy has left the Republican Party alone the guardian of the Ark of the Covenant with its charter of freedom.

A man builds a fine house; and now he has a master, and a task for life: he is to furnish, watch, show it, and keep it in repair, the rest of his days.

I hope that no American will waste his franchise and throw away his vote by voting either for me or against me solely on account of my religious affiliation. It is not relevant.

Government always finds a need for whatever money it gets.

Until the great mass of the people shall be filled with the sense of responsibility for each other’s welfare, social justice can never be attained.

He who has great power should use it lightly.

People forget… that we structured it so that the government, or the people, would be repaid with a really good rate of return. And as it turns out, that aspect of TARP, that’s what happened.

When it comes to the qualifications that we should demand of our president, to start with, we need someone who will take the job seriously.

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.

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.

Our country was founded by geniuses, but it’s being run by idiots.

The FBI should not be a political body.

Respect the burden.

When I have been asked during these last weeks who caused the riots and the killing in L.A., my answer has been direct and simple: Who is to blame for the riots? The rioters are to blame. Who is to blame for the killings? The killers are to blame.

If you want to cut your own throat, don’t come to me for a bandage.

What is ominous is the ease with which some people go from saying that they don’t like something to saying that the government should forbid it. When you go down that road, don’t expect freedom to survive very long.

After you finish a book, you know, you’re dead. But no one knows you’re dead. All they see is the irresponsibility that comes in after the terrible responsibility of writing.

He who does not prevent a crime when he can, encourages it.

When I joined the freedom movement in Mississippi in my early 20s, it was to come to the aid of sharecroppers, like my parents, who had been thrown off the land they’d always known – the plantations – because they attempted to exercise their ‚democratic‘ right to vote.

Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do.

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

What is a fear of living? It’s being preeminently afraid of dying. It is not doing what you came here to do, out of timidity and spinelessness. The antidote is to take full responsibility for yourself – for the time you take up and the space you occupy. If you don’t know what you’re here to do, then just do some good.

My desire to devolve authority has nothing to do with a wish to shirk responsibility.

Justice in the life and conduct of the State is possible only as first it resides in the hearts and souls of the citizens.

The spirit of America has nurtured responsibility and community unlike any other country.

Some people say that the climate crisis is something that we will have created, but that is not true, because if everyone is guilty then no one is to blame. And someone is to blame.

As a country, we can’t teach kids how to read and write when we got 18 years to do it. And that’s – that’s a disgrace.

Africans require, want, the franchise on the basis of one man one vote. They want political independence.

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

In this possibly terminal phase of human existence, democracy and freedom are more than just ideals to be valued – they may be essential to survival.

We’ve become, now, an oligarchy instead of a democracy. I think that’s been the worst damage to the basic moral and ethical standards to the American political system that I’ve ever seen in my life.

India is a democracy; it is in our DNA.

It’s OK to have your eggs in one basket as long as you control what happens to that basket.

The rights of persons, and the rights of property, are the objects, for the protection of which Government was instituted.

Character isn’t something you were born with and can’t change, like your fingerprints. It’s something you weren’t born with and must take responsibility for forming.

Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.

Every sin is the result of a collaboration.

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

You’ve got to vote, vote, vote, vote. That’s it; that’s the way we move forward. That’s how we make progress for ourselves and for our country.

The first duty of government is to see that people have food, fuel, and clothes. The second, that they have means of moral and intellectual education.

For success of any mission, it is necessary to have creative leadership. Creative leadership is vital for government, non-governmental organisations as well as for industries.

And I have no doubt that every new example will succeed, as every past one has done, in showing that religion and Government will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together.

Democracy is worth dying for, because it’s the most deeply honorable form of government ever devised by man.

No fundamental social change occurs merely because government acts. It’s because civil society, the conscience of a country, begins to rise up and demand – demand – demand change.

The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.

The only bipartisanship you ever see is when they finally sign a bill and everybody says, ‚Gee, isn’t that wonderful?‘

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

I believe this government cannot endure permanently, half slave and half free.