Sydney Pollack Quotes

We are under [government's] control, and if people don't realize that, they haven't looked around. And if they're not paranoid, they haven't thought about it.

The FBI has always supported big business and big government.

We have allowed an unholy alliance of government - the new monarchy - and corporate influence - the new aristocracy - to take control of events in a way that would have made our Founders shudder.

He who is the most strenuous for the rights of the people, when vested with power is as eager after for the prerogatives of government.

In the larger life of society, the people are made to submit to the orders of those who were originally meant to serve them—the government and its agents.

All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man.

The most express declarations and reservations are necessary to protect the just rights and liberty of mankind from the silent, powerful and ever active conspiracy of those who govern.

Government is no sooner created than it becomes too strong for society, and shapes and moulds, as well as controls it.

No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets.

Otherwise we don't run the government the government runs us

It is simply an invariable truth in the history of politics, in the history of government, that whenever a new power is acquired in the name of some threat, it always - not sometimes, not often, not usually -it always extends beyond its original application, beyond its original justification.

As soon as people drop the reins on government, government will leash the people.

You don't really want an army of people making individual decisions. And I don't think I completely understood that until people gave me examples of what happens when your army takes over your government and it's like, "Oh, yeah, I guess you can't really have people make individual moral decisions."

The issue is we're losing leverage. Governments are increasingly getting more power and we are increasingly losing our ability to control that power, and even to be aware of that power.

We should view our government the way we should a friendly, cuddly lion. Just because he's friendly and cuddly shouldn't blind us to the fact that he's still got teeth and claws.

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.

If someone from the government tries to put his hands on your money... run away as fast as you can and tell the nearest conservative.

The great fish swallow up the small; and he who is most strenuous for the rights of the people, when vested with power, is as eager after the prerogatives of government.

Half the population hold that the government is run by a few big interests looking out for themselves, as polls regularly show.

Government is in reality established by the few; and these few assume the consent of all the rest, without any such consent being actually given.

The government doesn't want us to have weapons and yet, they have weapons. I think the biggest weapon they have is the IRS - Internal Revenue Service. They can use taxes as a weapon, and the IRS code that you can't even figure it out.

It should be remembered, as an axiom of eternal truth in politics, that whatever power in any government is independent, is absolute also.

I think that has a lot of dangers, as does government surveillance, which is way too high.

Religion may in most of its forms be defined as the belief that the gods are on the side of the government.