Government Quotes – Insights on Leadership and Responsibility

"Those who decide are not elected, and those who are elected have nothing to decide."

Horst Seehofer

"Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under."

Henry Louis Mencken

"The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office. Their principal device to that end is to search out groups who pant and pine for something they can't get and to promise to give it to them. Nine times out of ten that promise is worth nothing. The tenth time is made good by looting A to satisfy B. In other words, government is a broker in pillage, and every election is sort of an advance auction sale of stolen goods."

Henry Louis Mencken

"Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…"

Winston Churchill

"Interest groups make the policy. They pull the strings on which political puppets hang, who are allowed to pretend democracy on the stage of the Berlin puppet show. These political figures are then allowed to deflate their speech bubbles in the public service institutions with the toilet ladies Christiansen and Illner. And if there is still some dribbling left after their intellectual urination, they can mingle with the people at the emotional piss trough on Beckmann and Kerner."

Georg Schramm

"Our revolution was the first in the history of mankind that truly reversed the course of government – and that with three little words: "We the People." "We the People" tell the government what to do; it doesn't tell us. "We the People" are the driver; the government is the car. And we decide where it should go, by what route, and how fast. Almost all the world's constitutions are documents in which governments tell the people what their privileges are. Our Constitution, however, is a document in which "We the People" tell the government what it may do. "We the People" are free. This belief has been the foundation for everything I've tried to achieve in the past eight years. But in the 1960s, when I began, it seemed to me we had begun to reverse the order of things. Through more and more rules, regulations, and crushing taxes, the government took more of our money, more choices, and more freedom. I went into politics to raise my hand and say "Stop!" I was a citizen, a politician by conviction – and it seemed the right thing to do. I think we have stopped much of what needed to be stopped. And I hope we have reminded people that man is not free if government has no limits. There is a clear connection here, as clear and predictable as a law of nature: As government grows, liberty shrinks."

Ronald Reagan

"What makes the difference between a gang and a state is the belief that there is a difference between a gang and a state."

Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski

"School is a sophisticated means of control by the state, created (or usurped from similar approaches by competing entities—churches, cities, private individuals) to accustom all citizens to obedience from childhood, to instill in them the suggestion of the necessity of the state, to nip any idea of emancipation in the bud, to steer the development of their thinking into well-maintained channels, and to drill them into comfortably governable, humble subjects."

Walter Borgius

"We should never forget that the constitution wasn't written to restrain citizens' behavior. It was written to restrain the government's behavior."

Rand Paul

"The state school system is a military system, modeled on and implemented from Prussian militarism. It is a chain of command from the government to the minister of education to the state secretary to the school inspector to the principal to the teacher to the student. The order: to implement the curriculum prescribed from above. This is a kind of state terror, intellectual terror."

Axel Burkart

"It is uninteresting who plays the leader of a nation; what is much more important is how many fools play along with this game."

Matthias Lubos

"The Government are extremely fond of amassing great quantities of statistics. These are raised to the nth degree, the cube roots are extracted, and the results are arranged into elaborate and impressive displays. What must be kept in mind, however, is that in every case, the figures are first put down by a village watchman, and he puts down anything he damn well pleases!"

Sir Josiah Stamp

"A people that is governed by a power must know the power by which it is governed. The people must direct and control that power. They must step in when it commits crimes; otherwise, the people become accomplices. The foundation of democracy is popular sovereignty, not the authority of a paternalistic state. It is not the citizen who stands in a relationship of obedience to the government; rather, the government is accountable to the citizen for its actions within the framework of the law. The citizen has the right and the duty to call the government to order if he believes that democratic rights are being violated."

Dr. Gustav Heinemann

"The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the larger centers has owned the Government ever since the days of Andrew Jackson..."

Franklin D. Roosevelt

"We will try to accommodate policymakers a little."

Dr. Martin Terhardt

"Germany is a supertanker—but sitting in the bridge is not the Federal Chancellor. Sitting there are the people here on this podium."

Ernst-Moritz Lipp

"People have no idea how many constraints there are in politics. Politicians are, to some extent, governed by processes, events, and procedures beyond their control. You are not all-powerful—at times, you are simply powerless."

Peter Tauber

"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else."

Claude Frédéric Bastiat