Alexander Fraser Tytler Quotes

I know why elected officials want to spend money. It’s great. I can get a vote from you if I give you some money. OK but that doesn’t help your children. It just helps you.

The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money.

The biggest drawback to democracy, he explained, is that elected representatives may not consider good governance their objective and may seek to usurp the electoral process in order to satisfy their own interests—and this unfortunately tarnishes the democratic ideal.

The great vice of democracy --- a vice which is exacting a bitter retribution from it at this moment - is that for a generation we have been busy getting ourselves on to the list of beneficiaries and removing ourselves from the list of contributors, as if somewhere there was somebody else's wealth and somebody else's effort on which we could thrive.

The host of contractors, speculators, stockjobbers, and lobby members which haunt the halls of Congress, all desirous ... to get their arm into the public treasury, are sufficient to alarm every friend of this country. Their progress must be arrested.

Congressmen have their noses right in the trough and they're slurping it up for their districts at the expense of all the taxpayers.

Conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and Cato Institute have criticized Bush for his big increases in spending, which far exceed those of the Clinton era.

The message is pretty clear: Americans are sick and tired of the doubletalk coming out of Washington, of us going home and saying we're conservative and then coming up here and voting for 10,000 earmarks. We can't fool America anymore; the media is too good. They're reporting what we're really doing.

For more than forty years, the United States Congress has shamelessly used payroll taxes intended for Social Security to fund big government spending.

In Congress, it's all pork, all the time.

The public is looking for free lunches, and the political competition for votes makes the politicians offer them free lunches.

We see people voting for bills that their ideals and principles are opposed to, but because their little funding project is in there, they're voting for it. We might say it's one percent of all spending but the impact of that spending is far greater.

The politicians in Washington are spending trillions of dollars of our money. When are Americans going to stand up and say enough is enough?

A democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years.

There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.

Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy that did not commit suicide.

There's more pork barrel than strategic need to the Galaxy.

If you leave the Republicans alone in a dark room, you know that there are going to rob the Social Security Trust Fund.

The evils we experience flow from an excess of democracy.

In a democracy we assume that people can define their own interest and vote that way.

Representative institutions are of little value, and may be a mere instrument of tyranny or intrigue, when the generality of electors [voters] are not sufficiently interested in their own government to give their vote, or, if they vote at all, do not bestow their suffrages on public grounds, but sell them for money, or vote at the beck of some one who has control over them

The root of most all problems we have today is the uncontrollable appetite of politicians in Washington to dish it out.

The President is going around the country handing out so much pork that the Agriculture Department is going to have to station a meat inspector on board Air Force One.

Tell Congress to go home and make an honest living instead of riding on the backs of the taxpayers.

In much of the democratic world, citizens lack any confidence that politicians, political parties, or government officials are serving anyone other than themselves.