Dick Cheney Quotes

I believe with my sage and epigrammatic friend P. J. O'Rourke that a government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take it all away.

Every amendment which I am convinced will have the tendency to lesson the danger of civil liberty by the central government will receive my sincere approbation.

A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away.

Who are a free people? Not those over whom government is exercised, but those who live under a government so constitutionally checked and controlled that proper provision is made against its being otherwise exercised

Our founding fathers undertook to create a country based on a notion of individual liberty because they were fleeing from countries in Europe where the government held too much power. They would look at what's happening today in John Ashcroft's Justice Department and say, 'Where have we gone wrong?'

Our devotion to individual freedom limits our readiness to give central government the power to override our traditional power structure.

There is no "slippery slope" toward loss of liberty, only a long staircase where each step down must first be tolerated by the American people and their leaders.

Those who seek always to limit the power of government are of good heart and conscience. Those who seek to expand the power of government are base tyrants.

Government has gotten too big, and it's infringed on our liberty and freedom.

The Constitution is not neutral. It was designed to take the government off the backs of people.

The most cogent reason for restricting the interference of government is the great evil of adding unnecessarily to its power.

We must guard against the overreaching hand of big government trying to take away our freedom. And we must always protect the environment in a manner consistent with our values.

The more laws that governments pass, the less individual freedom there is. Any student of history will tell you that. Totalitarian countries ban pretty much everything.

It's not tyranny we desire; it's a just, limited, federal government.

If Obamacare is allowed to stand - and Congress is allowed to make the purchase of government-endorsed health insurance compulsory - there will be no meaningful limit on Washington's reach into the lives of the American people. That is certainly not what the Founders intended.

All our rights are gradually eroded as government gets bigger.

We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force.

A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.

If a free society is ever destroyed in America, it will be done in the name of one particular vision of liberty and freedom.

There exists in modem America the necessity for protecting all of us from arbitrary action by governments more powerful and more pervasive than any in our ancestors’ time.

The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and for government to gain ground.

It must never be forgotten ... that the liberties of the people are not so safe under the gracious manner of government as by the limitation of power.

This is the first time that the Federal Government has told a free people what kind of government they must have. If they can do that, they can tell you what time to go to bed, what time to get up, and whether to have pork and beans for lunch.

As our federal government has grown too large and too powerful, the real loss has been the freedom of people to govern their own lives and participate fully in the American dream

I have an institutional fear of big government. I have an institutional opposition to bureaucracy.