Feeling good about government is like looking on the bright side of any catastrophe. When you quit looking on the bright side, the catastrophe is still there.
Laws too gentle are seldom obeyed; too severe, seldom executed.
We live under a government of men and morning newspapers.
Ohio claims they are due a president as they haven’t had one since Taft. Look at the United States, they have not had one since Lincoln.
The world is not going to be saved by legislation.
Government is essentially immoral.
The Republican form of government is the highest form of government: but because of this it requires the highest type of human nature, a type nowhere at present existing.
The fact that political ideologies are tangible realities is not a proof of their vitally necessary character. The bubonic plague was an extraordinarily powerful social reality, but no one would have regarded it as vitally necessary.
A little group of willful men, representing no opinion but their own, have rendered the great government of the United States helpless and contemptible.
When I read about the way in which library funds are being cut and cut, I can only think that American society has found one more way to destroy itself.
Democracy needs support, and the best support for democracy comes from other democracies.
Here is my first principle of foreign policy: good government at home.
The greater part of the governments on earth may be termed monarchical aristocracies, or hereditary dominions independent of the people.
There is often, in the affairs of government, more efficiency and wisdom in non-action than in action.
Americans no longer look to government for economic security; rather, they look to their portfolios.
If there’s anything a public servant hates to do it’s something for the public.
It is hard to feel individually responsible with respect to the invisible processes of a huge and distant government.
To hear some men talk of the government, you would suppose that Congress was the law of gravitation, and kept the planets in their places.
The way people in democracies think of the government as something different from themselves is a real handicap. And, of course, sometimes the government confirms their opinion.
I think governments can’t do much.
Voters quickly forget what a man says.
All government wars are unjust.
The mistakes made by Congress wouldn’t be so bad if the next Congress didn’t keep trying to correct them.
But no one has yet succeeded in reducing the size or scope of the federal government.
Democracy must learn to defend itself.
