Browsing Topic Best Limited Government Quotes

Collecting more taxes than is absolutely necessary is legalized robbery.

A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.

The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it. Power is what all messiahs really seek: not the chance to serve. This is true even of the pious brethren who carry the gospel to foreign parts.

That government is best which governs least.

We Americans have no commission from God to police the world.

The greater the power, the more dangerous the abuse.

One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

The problem is big government. If whoever controls government can impose his way upon you, you have to fight constantly to prevent the control from being harmful. With small, limited government, it doesn’t much matter who controls it, because it can’t do you much harm.

Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.

Nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced.

As a political independent, I would gladly vote for any political party dedicated to limited government and entrepreneurship.

The whole of the Bill [of Rights] is a declaration of the right of the people at large or considered as individuals… It establishes some rights of the individual as unalienable and which consequently, no majority has a right to deprive them of.

They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

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if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is to-day, can guess what it will be tomorrow.

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until a majority of voters discover that they can vote themselves largess out of the public treasury.

Tyranny is always better organized than freedom.

When power is for sale, then government power should be severely limited. When power is abused, then the less power the better.

It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies.

The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.

Wherever is found what is called a paternal government, there is found state education. It has been discovered that the best way to insure implicit obedience is to commence tyranny in the nursery.

The prestige of government has undoubtedly been lowered considerably by the prohibition law. For nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced. It is an open secret that the dangerous increase of crime in this country is closely connected with this.

Those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the struggle for independence.

People in Eastern Washington should be confident in knowing that the government will not come and seize their property or farm land. Legislation is needed to correct this decision and restore the principle of having limited government involvement.

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.

The laws that forbid the carrying of arms…disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes. Can it be supposed that those who have the courage to violate the most sacred laws of humanity…will respect the less important and arbitrary ones… Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants, they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.

We believe that human happiness requires freedom and that freedom requires limited government.

What the issue here is, you get rid of all the conservative orthodoxy about capital gains, marginal tax rate, supply side economics, you just throw all that out the window, limited government and you just embrace the sheer and raw politics of resentment that have been bubbling the whole time and that`s what you get. You get Donald Trump.

You can only be free if I am free.

Emergency does not increase granted power or remove or diminish the restrictions imposed upon power granted or reserved. The Constitution was adopted in a period of grave emergency. Its grants of power to the federal government and its limitations of the power of the States were determined in the light of emergency, and they are not altered by emergency.

Citizens … should be practitioners of civic virtue in their conduct toward government. They should be ever willing to fulfill the duties of citizenship. This includes compulsory duties like military service and the numerous voluntary actions they must take if they are to preserve the principle of limited government through citizen self-reliance.

While an equality of rights under a limited government is possible and an essential condition of individual freedom, a claim for equality of material position can be met only by a government with totalitarian powers.

Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all . . . . It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain