THOUGHT FOR THE DAY:

GOVERNMENT...SELECT QUOTATIONS:

*Administration covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened,bent, guided;men are seldom restrained from acting,such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, extinguishes and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nother better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which government is the shepherd.

-Alexis de Tocqueville in 'Democracy In America' (1835)

*Their question hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today- my own government.

-Martin Luther King Jr. Speech at Riverside Church in New York City (http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45a/058.html )

*People should not be afraid of their government. Governments should be afraid of their people.

-V in 'V for Vendetta' (2006)

*Civil government, insofar as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, of those who have some property against those who have none at all.

-Adam Smith

*Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.

-P.J. O'Rourke

*Government is a disease masquerading as its own cure.

-L. Neil Smith

*I heartily accept the motto "That government is best which governs least", and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out it finally amounts to this, which I also believe, :That government is best which governs not at all", and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.

-Henry David Thoreau

*It is just as difficult and dangerous to try and free a people which wants to remain servile as it is to enslave a people that wants to remain free.

-Machiavelli

*No government, of its own motion, will increase its own weakness, for that would mean to acquiesce in its own destruction...governments, whatever their pretensions otherwise, try to preserve themselves by holding the individual down...Government itself, indeed, may be reasonably defined as a conspiracy against him. Its one permanent aim, whatever its form, is to hobble him sufficiently to maintain itself.

-H.L Menchen

TO BE CONTINUED...