Quotes by Politicians - Page 53

Ours was the first nation to be founded on the idea that all are created equal and all deserve equal treatment under the law. Despite our missteps and shortcomings, these ideals still inspire hope among the oppressed and give us pride in being Americans.
Jimmy Carter
When avarice takes the lead in a state, it is commonly the forerunner of its fall.
Alexander Hamilton
A government of laws, and not of men
John Adams
Government is instituted for the common good; for the protection, safety, prosperity and happiness of the people; and not for the profit, honor, or private interest of any one man, family, or class of men.
John Adams
The government of the United States is a device for maintaining in perpetuity the rights of the people, with the ultimate extinction of all privileged classes.
Calvin Coolidge
In fact, if law were restricted to protecting all persons, all liberties, and all properties; if law were nothing more than the organized combination of the individual's right to self-defense; if law were the obstacle, the check, the punisher of all oppression and plunder — is it likely that we citizens would then argue much about the extent of the franchise?
Frédéric Bastiat
How is the schoolmaster, the nation, to know which boy needs the whipping?
Woodrow Wilson
I need to say this – you shouldn't trust any government, actually including this one. You should not trust government – full stop. The natural inclination of government is to hoard power and information; to accrue power to itself in the name of the public good.
Nick Clegg
When our government is spoken of as some menacing, threatening foreign entity, it ignores the fact that, in our democracy, government is us.
Barack Obama
When there’s a vacuum of public input, lobbyists usually fill it. But when there’s public input, the people usually win.
Morgan Carroll
Every time government attempts to handle our affairs, it costs more and the results are worse than if we had handled them ourselves.
Benjamin Constant
The social organs are constituted so as to enable them to develop harmoniously in the grand air of liberty. Away, then, with quacks and organizers! Away with their rings, and their chains, and their hooks, and their pincers! Away with their artificial methods! Away with their social laboratories, their governmental whims, their centralization, their tariffs, their universities, their State religions, their inflationary or monopolizing banks, their limitations, their restrictions, their moralizations, and their equalization by taxation! And now, after having vainly inflicted upon the social body so many systems, let them end where they ought to have begun — reject all systems, and try of liberty — liberty, which is an act of faith in God and in His work
Frédéric Bastiat
The President and the Congress are all very well in their way. They can say what they think they think, but it rests with the Supreme Court to decide what they have really thought.
Theodore Roosevelt
Unless government appropriately regulates oil developments and holds oil executives accountable, the public will not trust them to drill, baby, drill. And we must!
Sarah Palin
Without debate, without criticism no administration and no country can succeed and no republic can survive.
John F Kennedy
The government cannot give to anybody anything that thegovernment does not first take from somebody else.
Adrian Rogers
Obviously these are some exceptional young people, but what they have in common is that they were ordinary people who cared. They wanted to act, to do something, to make life better for other people—and they have.
Morgan Carroll
Hence, likewise, they will avoid the necessity of those overgrown military establishments, which, under any form of government, are inauspicious to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to Republican Liberty. In this sense it is, that your Union ought to be considered as a main prop of your liberty, and that the love of the one ought to endear to you the preservation of the other.
George Washington
I have an idea about voting, how about on every ballot we include "None of the above". People may laugh at that, but what that is, it is a vote of no confidence in your government and I'm willing to bet that in some elections, 'None of the Above' would win. Imagine if you won the election but lost to 'None of the Above'. Wouldn't that make you re-think your positions?
Jesse Ventura
The great rule of conduct for us, in regard to foreign nations, is, in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible.
George Washington
This country would not be a land of opportunity, America could not be America, if the people were shackled with government monopolies.
Calvin Coolidge
They criticize me for harping on the obvious; if all the folks in the United States would do the few simple things they know they ought to do, most of our big problems would take care of themselves.
Calvin Coolidge
My definition of democracy is - A form and a method of Government whereby revolutionary changes in the social life are brought about without bloodshed. That is the real test. It is perhaps the severest test. But when you are judging the quality of the material you must put it to the severest test.
B.R. Ambedkar
It is substantially true, that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government. The rule, indeed, extends with more or less force to every species of free government.
George Washington
Democracy is not merely a form of Government. It is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience. It is essentially an attitude of respect and reverence towards our fellow men.
B.R. Ambedkar
In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem, government IS the problem. It isn't so much that liberals are ignorant, it's just that they know so much that isn't so.
Ronald Reagan
You and I are told we must choose between a left or right, but I suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down. Up to man's age-old dream -- the maximum of individual freedom consistent with order --or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism. Regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would sacrifice freedom for security have embarked on this downward path.
Ronald Reagan
The government is us; WE are the government, you and I."- Theodore Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt
Nothing lasts longer than a temporary government program.
Ronald Reagan
The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation and foreign commerce. ... The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects which in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives and liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement and prosperity of the State.
James Madison
Democracy is worth dying for, because it's the most deeply honorable form of government ever devised by man.
Ronald Reagan
It is much more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones.
Calvin Coolidge
If ever a time should come, when vain and aspiring men shall possess the highest seats in Government, our country will stand in need of its experienced patriots to prevent its ruin.
Samuel Adams
When one gets in bed with government, one must expect the diseases it spreads.
Ron Paul
Government does not solve problems. It subsidizes them.
Ronald Reagan
A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.
Gerald R. Ford
The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money.
Margaret Thatcher
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."(Speech in the House of Commons, 11 November 1947)
Winston S. Churchill
A Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored. Liberty, once lost, is lost forever.
John Adams
A character for steadiness once gone is not easily recovered
Thomas Hughes
Just think how happy you'd be if you lost everything you have right now & then got it back.
Ronald Reagan
To test a man, determine how much it takes to make him lie.
C.J. Langenhoven
Leadership consists of nothing but taking responsibility for everything that goes wrong and giving your subordinates credit for everything that goes well.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
A man of fifty is responsible for his face.
Edwin McMasters Stanton
There is no index of character as sure as the voice.
Benjamin Disraeli
Bodily vigor is good, and vigor of intellect is even better, but far above both is character. It is true, of course, that a genius may, on certain lines, do more than a brave and manly fellow who is not a genius; and so, in sports, vast physical strength may overcome weakness, even though the puny body may have in it the heart of a lion. But, in the long run, in the great battle of life, no brilliancy of intellect, no perfection of bodily development, will count when weighed in the balance against that assemblage of virtues, active and passive, of moral qualities, which we group together under the name of character; and if between any two contestants, even in college sport or in college work, the difference in character on the right side is as great as the difference of intellect or strength the other way, it is the character side that will win.
Theodore Roosevelt
After a sharp inward struggle, he concluded to stay and see it out. He should despise himself, more than he cared to face, if he gave in now.
Thomas Hughes
Religious devotion is for the individual. Character is for all. There is no loss if there is no devotion. Everything is lost if there is no character.
Periyar E.V. Ramasamy
only if we act greatly in meeting our responsibilities abroad will we remain a great nation, and only if we remain a great nation will we act greatly in meeting our challenges at home
Richard M. Nixon
Some men, under the pressure of incarceration, showed true mettle, while others revealed themselves as less than what they had appeared to be.
Nelson Mandela
A man's character is only formed after the impressions of childhood and early youth have become blended with the indefinable and hidden influences both atavistic and of more immediate heredity. When, like soft clay, the newborn human spirit has been first fashioned by the firm hand of the modeller and then allowed to set and harden, this is the moment of the final character emerges, fixed for life. While the part played by heredity will always remains elusive and uncertain, the influence of a man's early years are not difficult to unfurl if we know where to seek and consider seriously what we find.
Miklós Bánffy
What I took out of them was that character was measured by facing up to difficult situations and that a hero was a man who would not break even under the most trying circumstances.
Nelson Mandela
As the cool and deliberate sense of the community ought, in all governments, and actually will, in all free governments, ultimately prevail over the views of its rulers; so there are particular moments in public affairs when the people, stimulated by some irregular passion, or some illicit advantage, or misled by the artful misrepresentations of interested men, may call for measures which they themselves will afterwards be the most ready to lament and condemn.
James Madison
There are, basically, three kinds of people: the unsuccessful, the temporarily successful, and those who become and remain successful. The difference is character.
Jon Hunstman
Why are some countries able, despite their very real and serious problems, to press ahead along the road to reconciliation, recovery, and redevelopment while others cannot? These are critical questions for Africa, and their answers are complex and not always clear. Leadership is crucial, of course. Kagame was a strong leader–decisive, focused, disciplined, and honest–and he remains so today. I believe that sometimes people's characters are molded by their environment. Angola, like Liberia, like Sierra Leone, is resource-rich, a natural blessing that sometimes has the sad effect of diminishing the human drive for self-sufficiency, the ability and determination to maximize that which one has. Kagame had nothing. He grew up in a refugee camp, equipped with only his own strength of will and determination to create a better life for himself and his countrymen.
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf
It's not what you do but that kind of job you do that makes the difference.
Ben Carson
A man of character finds a special attractiveness in difficulty, since it is only by coming to grips with difficulty that he can realize his potentialities.
Charles de Gaulle
Character, in the long run, is the decisive factor in the life of an individual and of nations alike.
Theodore Roosevelt
It is better to be alone than in bad company.
George Washington
My love is of a birth as rareAs 'tis, for object, strange and high;It was begotten by DespairUpon Impossibility.
Andrew Marvell