Charley Reese Quotes

Already I realize the tremendous effort it requires not to be taken over by the Civil Service. My Minister’s room is like a padded cell, and in certain ways I am like a person who is suddenly certified a lunatic and put safely into this great vast room, cut off from real life ... Of course, they don’t behave quite like nurses because the Civil Service is profoundly deferential – “Yes, Minister! No, Minister! If you wish it, Minister! Yes minister.”

It is no secret that Washington, D.C., is a tempest of people and institutions relentlessly seeking power over the lives of everyday Americans.

The FBI has always supported big business and big government.

I am the Federal Government.

Think of the press as a great keyboard on which the government can play.

How fortunate for governments that the people they administer don't think.

Party domination and State leadership are concepts incompatible with one another.

We are the beast of state government.

A bureaucracy is sure to think that its duty is to augment official power, official business, or official members, rather than leave free the energies of mankind.

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.

In a corporate state, all attempts to reduce bureaucracy increase it.

When everyone owns something, in reality nobody owns it. Control then occurs merely by the whims of the politicians in power.

Bureaucracy is ever desirous of spreading its influence and its power. You cannot extend the mastery of the government over the daily working life of a people without at the same time making it the master of the people's souls and thoughts.

Either you will control your government, or government will control you.

Once a bureau is created, its staff becomes a tenacious political interest group, well placed to defend its budget and to make a case for expanding its activities.

As government grows, freedom recedes.

We are not taught to fear our politicians, who can debase our currency, throw us in prison and send us to war - but rather we are taught to fear each other. We are taught to imagine that the real predators in this world are not those who control prison cells, national debts and nuclear weapons, but rather our fellow citizens, who in the absence of brutal control would surely tear us apart!

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

The ever-growing power of a soulless political bureaucracy which supervises and safeguards the life of man from the cradle to the grave is putting ever-greater obstacles in the way of co-operation among human beings.

The government is good at one thing. It knows how to break your legs, and then hand you a crutch and say, "See if it weren't for the government, you wouldn't be able to walk".

The object of the state is always the same: to limit the individual, to tame him, to subordinate him, to subjugate him.

The capitalist class rules but does not govern: it contents itself with ruling the government.

The envied are like bureaucrats; the more impersonal they are, the greater the illusion (for themselves and for others) of their power.

You see, that's the whole point of being in government. If you don't like something you simply make up a law that makes it illegal.

Plato assumes somehow that government is a way in which you put unselfish and ungreedy men in charge of selfish and greedy men. But government is an institution whereby the people who have the greatest drive to get power over their fellow men, get in a position of controlling them. Look at the record of government. Where are these philosopher kings that Plato supposedly was trying to develop?