Gustave Courbet Quotes

What is the government? Nothing, unless supported by opinion.

Government is an association of men who do violence to the rest of us.

Who knows what the hell a government is or what the hell a government does.

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

Government is the agent of those who are too refined to do their own mugging.

I am the Federal Government.

We carry out our work under the leadership of the government.

Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.

Governments rather depend upon men, than men upon governments.

Exploitation and government are two inseparable expressions of what is called politics.

Government is a necessary evil

For government consists in nothing else but so controlling subjects that they shall neither be able to, nor have cause to do [it] harm.

The business of government is justice.

All government is an ugly necessity.

Government is not capable of caring. Government gets things done through coercion. They fine, they penalize, they tax, they confiscate, they jail, they bully to get what they want.

People in the White House work hard, whatever administration. They get rewarded in psychic income, a sense that they are involved in something bigger than themselves, that it's important.

You get the same order of criminality from any State to which you give power to exercise it; and whatever power you give the State to do things for you carries with it the equivalent power to do things to you.

This American government - what is it but a tradition, though a recent one, endeavoring to transmit itself unimpaired to posterity, but each instant losing some of its integrity? It has not the vitality and force of a single living man; for a single man can bend it to his will.

ADMINISTRATION, n. An ingenious abstraction in politics, designed to receive the kicks and cuffs due to the premier or president. A man of straw, proof against bad-egging and dead-catting.

The freedom of a government does not depend on the quality of its laws, but upon the power that has the right to create them.

I don't know what our government does except put us into debt and blow up other countries.

It is not the State that orders us; but it is we who order the State!

I am president, I don't own the country so they are not my forces.

Most of us think of government as them. Yet government isn't Them: It's us.

Taxation is robbery based on monopoly of weapons