Molly Ivins Quotes

Be thankful we're not getting all the government we're paying for.

I'm very aware when I'm speaking to the English of how flat my Mid-Atlantic American voice is.

People have been warning us that language was going to the dogs ever since Latin started turning into French. Yet the dogs in question never seem to emerge yelping on the horizon.

That's one of the ways language evolved, by some very obscure form becoming common usage. And I must say that I'm very intrigued by use of language and slang, and criminal underground terms.

I saw what government programs were and how they were executed. In some cases, they were executed beautifully, but in others, there was tremendous waste.

I can hardly understand the Australian accent.

When government grows, it breaks the family.

Investing capital in the free market creates innovation, businesses, jobs and economic growth. Investing capital in the government creates more bureaucracy, more paperwork and inefficiency.

Some people say that watching pay freezes in the government is like watching water freeze. It expands.

The U.S. government has in recent years fought what it termed wars against AIDs, drug abuse, poverty, illiteracy and terrorism. Each of those wars has budgets, legislation, offices, officials, letterhead - everything necessary in a bureaucracy to tell you something is real.

I find standard American the hardest. It really fits in a different place in your mouth. Southern, I find the easiest. If you talk to a dialect coach and you get sort of technical, where an English person keeps their voice in their throat, a Southern person does the same, and it's got the same sort of music to talking.

I believe that government is too large, costs too much, spends too much, and has too much regulatory power in our lives.

The Civil Service is a self-perpetuating oligarchy, and what better system is there?

Government is good at one thing. It knows how to cripple you and then hand you a crutch.

There are two problems in my life. The political ones are insoluble and the economic ones are incomprehensible.

Governments are not like a business. They don’t look like a business, work like a business, think like a business, and they don’t have a bottom line.

The size of government is not altogether that large in this country.

Government in the U.S. today is a senior partner in every business in the country

Government can’t work if lawmakers don’t give Government agencies the funds they need to do their work.

I think, for the English accent, we don't say our Rs, contrary to a standard American accent.

I, like many annoying pedants, will wince when someone says 'less' when they should have said 'fewer.' But my 'poor' sounds like poo-ah, not pore; and my 'grass' rhymes with mass, not farce. What's wrong with that?

There's a convention in English stuff that if something is more than 100 years old, people have to say 'do not' instead of 'don't. They have to say 'will not' instead of 'won't.' People are speaking in a way that is not accessible or normal. And people didn't ever speak like that.

You can't be for big government, big taxes and big bureaucracy and still be for the little guy.

Taxes are the source of life for the bureaucracy, the army and the court, in short, for the whole apparatus of the executive power. Strong government and heavy taxes are identical.

When the fountains of government [borrowing] abundance began to dry up, when through lack of funds and the impossibility of negotiating fresh loans the state was forced to check the extension of bureaucracy and to put a stop to public works, then and then only did the Italians realize what it meant to have allowed themselves to be made one of the most heavily taxed nations in the world.