Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Quotes

It is on opinion only that government is founded; and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments, as well as to the most free and most popular.

Potentially, a government is the most dangerous threat to man's rights: it holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force against legally disarmed victims.

The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.

Government is a necessary evil

All such men are, or ought to be, agreed, that simple governments are despotisms; and of all despotisms, a democracy, though the least durable, is the most violent.

The idea of sovereignty current in the English speaking world of the 1760's was scarcely more than a century old. It had first emerged during the English Civil War, in the early 1640's, and had been established as a canon of Whig political thought in the Revolution of 1688.

Governments don't control things. A government can't control the economy without controlling people.

I think that people who believe in limited government would benefit greatly by studying the logic in government itself and the role of power as a corruptive mechanism in leading finally to unlimited government.

Every step we take towards making the State our Caretaker of our lives, by that much we move toward making the State our Master.

The absolute rule of the state shall be a function of the absolute liberty of each individual will.

Government has within it a tendency to abuse its powers.

The fundamental article of my political creed is that despotism, or limited sovereignty, or absolute power is the same [whether] in a majority of a popular assembly; an aristocratic council; or oligarchical junto and a single emperor - equally arbitrary, cruel, bloody and in every respect diabolical.

Nature abhors a vacuum, even in the heads of statesmen.

The only idea they have ever manifested as to what is a government of consent, is this - that it is one to which everybody must consent, or be shot.

A free government with an uncontrolled power of military conscription is the most ridiculous and abominable contradiction and nonsense that ever entered into the heads of men.

There is no such thing as a good government. There never was. There can't be.

Throughout history, government has proved to be the chief instrument for thwarting man's liberty.

Government is the exercise of all the great qualities of the human mind.

Conservatives are inclined to use the powers of government to prevent change or to limit its rate to whatever appeals to the more timid mind. In looking forward, they lack the faith in the spontaneous forces of adjustment which makes the liberal accept changes without apprehension, even though he does not know how the necessary adaptations will be brought about.

For the Fascist, everything is the State, and nothing human or spiritual exists, much less has value, outside the State. In this sense Fascism is totalitarian.

To possess ourselves of a clear idea of what government is, or ought to be, we must trace it to its origin.

No government knows any limits to its power except the endurance of the people.

Government has no right to make itself a party in any debates respecting the principles or mode of forming or of changing, constitutions. It is not for the benefit of those who exercise the powers of government, that constitutions, and the governments issuing from them, are established.

I have not hesitated to call the system of Government under which we are labouring 'satanic' and I withdraw naught out of it.

The bigger a state becomes the more liberty diminishes.