Dave Barry Quotes

The most cogent reason for restricting the interference of government is the great evil of adding unnecessarily to its power.

A government role in our society should be inherently suspect …. There is something inherently coercive in the nature of government.

It is true that liberty is not free, nor is it easy. But tyranny - even varying degrees of it - is much more difficult, and much more expensive. The time has come to rein in the federal government, put it on a crash diet, and let the people keep their money and their liberty.

There has been no organized effort to keep government down since Jefferson's day. Ever since then the American people have been bolstering up its powers and giving it more and more jurisdiction over their affairs. They pay for that folly in increased taxes and diminished liberties.

I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.

I think myself that we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious. Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have ... The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases. 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.

Big government makes small citizens.

Here in America, government began as a tool to assure freedom. It gradually turned into a hideously expensive political toy designed to redistribute your wealth and control most aspects of your business and private life.

I own that I am not a friend to a very energetic government. It is always oppressive.

We have to attack those things which stand in the way of America progress. And what stands in the way of American progress right now is the federal government.

We have seen an outrageous increase in the size, scope, and intrusiveness of the federal government.

We don't want a busybody government - a boss - that butts into our lives every chance it gets to tell us how to work, how to play, where to live and on and on.

Fiscal conservatism is just an easy way to express something that is a bit more difficult, which is that the size and scope of government, and really the size and scope of politics in our lives, has grown uncomfortable, unwieldy, intrusive and inefficient.

The government is supposed to conform to our will. By taking the most important thing you have, your health and your health care, and turning that over to the government, you fundamentally shift the power, a huge chunk of it, from the people to the government. This is not the direction that we want the government to go in this nation.

When bureaucrats talk about increasing our 'access' to x, y or z, what they're really talking about is increasing exponentially their control over our lives. As it is with the government health care takeover, so it is with the newly approved government plan to 'increase' Internet 'access.'

When one gets in bed with government, one must expect the diseases it spreads.

Before my tenure, people didn't seem to think that citizens had a right to limit the size of their government.

The greatest threat to our freedom is an all powerful federal government.

I have an institutional fear of big government. I have an institutional opposition to bureaucracy.

Let the Democrates go on making its case for more government control over every aspect of our lives. More taxes to pay. More debt to carry. More rules to follow. More judges who just make it up as they go along. We Republicans, we are committed to a federal government that acts again as a servant accountable to the people, following the constitution, and venturing not one inch beyond the consent of the governed. We, we in this party, offer a better way for our country based on fundamentals that go back to the founding generation.

We are a nation that has a government - not the other way around. And this makes us special among the nations of the earth. Our government has no power except that granted to it by the people It is time to check and reverse the growth of government which shows signs of having grown beyond the consent of the governed.

When government gets too big, freedom is lost. Government is supposed to be the servant. But when a government can tax the people with no limit or restraint on what the government can take, then the government has become the master.

My quarrel is not with the legitimate role of government but with the unlimited role of government.

America needs fewer laws, not more prisons. By trying to seize far more power than is necessary over American citizens, the federal government is destroying its own legitimacy. We face a choice not of anarchy or authoritarianism, but a choice of limited government or unlimited government .

If more government is the answer, then it was a really stupid question.