Charles Kennedy Quotes

What we have to do is strike a balance between the idea that government shall do everything and the idea that government shall do nothing.

But you're never taught in schools - we don't teach anyone in public schools that government is the problem. We don't teach anyone in college that government is the problem - except maybe a handful of sort of unique, conservative schools. But mainstream media never talks as if government is the problem.

The new rage is to say that the government is the cause of all our problems, and if only we had no government, we'd have no problems. I can tell you, that contradicts evidence, history, and common sense.

The biggest challenge is always the governments - they try to stop all good things. I try to stay away from them as much as I can, as I know if someone can destroy something good, it's the government.

The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem.

I own that I am not a friend to a very energetic government. It is always oppressive.

I had a lot of friends in high school who said, 'Louie, I don't care what the government does as long as they leave me alone.' Well, guess what, when you don't care what the government does, it does not leave you alone.

The best episodes of 'The West Wing' that dealt with policy and stuff, in my opinion, were the ones where they were in the middle of a crisis, and they were trying to figure out how to solve problems.

Attention shouldn't be on finding ways to build a better government; we should be looking at how to get government out of our lives.

Just because there is a market failure, doesn’t mean there is a government solution.

A government role in our society should be inherently suspect …. There is something inherently coercive in the nature of government.

None of my Governments seem to know what to do about them

Legislation is a matter of more or less intelligent improvisation aiming at palliating conditions by means of patchwork policies.

When a government faces an evil that might be avoided, the usual pattern is to first debate whether or not the evil is real or imagined; then determine how evil it really is; then is it an appropriate function of government to avoid it? Then what are the alternative ways to avoid it? Then what are the costs to avoid it? And finally, is the benefit of avoiding the evil worth the cost? In those cases where it is, it is by this time too late to avoid the evil and discussions shift to ameliorating the evil.

If I could solve these problems with passing laws in the Congress, I would do so.

Nine-tenths of the activities of a modern Government are harmful; therefore the worse they are performed, the better.

If you can't legislate, you can't deal with problems.

You've got the federal government in every part of our lives, doing things wrong.

The Republicans cry for smaller government; however, it seems that at every turn, they work at interfering with the lives of Americans, and we can add food-choice to the list.

We have reached a moment in our history where we think that every problem in America has to have a federal government solution. Every problem in America does not have a federal government solution. In fact, most problems in America do not have a federal government solution and many of them are created by the federal government to begin with.

What happens when you have vast legislative overreach is you don't particularly fix the problem you started out to fix but create problems for everyone else.

People who create things nowadays can expect to be prosecuted by highly moralistic people who are incapable of creating anything. There is no way to measure the chilling effect on innovation that results from the threats of taxation, regulation and prosecution against anything that succeeds. We'll never know how many ideas our government has aborted in the name protecting us.

I'm a little embarrassed about how long it took me to see the folly of most government intervention. It was probably 15 years before I really woke up to the fact that almost everything government attempts to do, it makes worse.

In politics there's never a magic wand.

Everyone on the Commission assumes that 9/11 resulted from a lack of government action. No one in Washington has raised the question of whether our shortcomings, brought to light by 9/11, could have been a result of too much government.