"You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing. If you have been living in a world where outcomes are everything, you may have a very hard time understanding bureaucratic thinking or practices." -- Dr. Thomas Sowell
"The policy of the American government is to leave their citizens free, neither restraining nor aiding them in their pursuits." -- Thomas Jefferson
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"When governments fear the people there is liberty. When the people fear the government there is tyranny." -- Thomas Jefferson
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws." -- Tacitus, Roman senator and historian (AD c.56-c.115)
"The more laws, the less justice." -- Marcus Tullius Cicero, orator, statesman and the last free consul of Rome. (ca. BC. 42)
"It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong." -- Dr. Thomas Sowell
"Elected leaders tend to believe they are responsible for a lot more than they really are. Like the little boy on his first plane trip 'helping' the plane by flapping his arms as the Boeing 747 begins to ascend, legislators often seem to believe that somehow they run the economy and solve lots of problems." -- Curt Leonard
"Why do we need a Department of Commerce? It's like asking fish to establish a Department of Swimming." -- Scott Cook
"Beware the greedy hand of government, thrusting itself into every corner and crevice of industry." -- Thomas Paine
"Most bad government results from too much government." -- Thomas Jefferson
" Politicians don't like empowered individuals." -- Neal Boortz
"The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos." -- H. L. Mencken
"My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those who do the work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the first group; there was less competition there." -- Indira Gandhi
"We are now, my friends, in a situation where the majority of Americans get their news and information about what is going on with their government from entities that are licensed by and subject to punishment at the hands of that very government. Nobody can truly believe that this is what our founding fathers had in mind." -- Neal Boortz
"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." -- Frédéric Bastiat
"Free government is founded in jealousy, not confidence. It is jealousy and not confidence which prescribes limited constitutions, to bind those we are obliged to trust with power.... In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in men, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution." -- Thomas Jefferson
"There is nothing so bad that politics cannot make it worse." -- Dr. Thomas Sowell
"The two enemies of the people are criminals and government, so let us tie the second down with the chains of the Constitution so the second will not become the legalized version of the first." -- Thomas Jefferson
"The true foundation of republican government is the equal right of every citizen in his person and property and in their management." -- Thomas Jefferson
"[If government have] a right of demanding ad libitum and of taxing us themselves to the full amount of their demand if we do not comply with it, [this would leave] us without anything we can call property." -- Thomas Jefferson
"When governments fear the people there is liberty. When the people fear the government there is tyranny." -- Thomas Jefferson
"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." -- H.L. Mencken
"The kind of man who wants the government to adopt and enforce his ideas is always the kind of man whose ideas are idiotic." -- H. L. Mencken
"There is nothing quite so depressing as waking up to face a day when you know that you are going to have to deal with a government office or bureaucrat." -- Neal Boortz
"Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned." -- Dr. Milton Friedman
"If you're going to sin, sin against God, not the bureaucracy. God will forgive you, but the bureaucracy won't". – Admiral Hyman G. Rickover
"Just as members of American teachers' unions often send their own children to private schools, so unionized workers at government-run hospitals in Britain have insurance that allows them to go to private hospitals. In both cases, those on the inside realize how bad these institutions are, regardless of what they say to those on the outside." -- Thomas Sowell
"Pledge allegiance to your principles, your family, your faith, but don't be foolish enough to pledge allegiance to a gang of thieves." -- Lew Rockwell
"The only good bureaucrat is one with a pistol at his head. Put it in his hand and it's good-bye to the Bill of Rights." -- H.L. Mencken
"The Declaration of Independence is so lucid we're afraid of it today. It scares the hell out of every modern bureaucrat, because it tells them there comes a time when we must stop taking orders." -- Karl Hess
"The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it to be always kept alive." -- Thomas Jefferson
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. ... God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion; what country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms." -- Thomas Jefferson
"The right of self-defence is the first law of nature; in most governments it has been the study of rulers to confine this right within the narrowest limits possible. Wherever standing armies are kept up, and when the right of the people to keep and bear arms is, under any color or pretext whatsoever, prohibited, liberty, if not already annihilated, is on the brink of destruction." -- Henry St. George Tucker, in Blackstone's 1768 Commentaries on the Laws of England. |
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