Lewis Black Quotes

The central issue of our time - of all times - is the size, power and scope of government.

My plan is to govern as long as I can.

Do you want to make a statement or do you want to make a law?

The essence of government is control, or the attempt to control.

The contest for ages has been to rescue liberty from the grasp of executive power.

Governments propose, and oppositions dispose.

The Congress must regain the will to govern.

The president has to govern.

Government is an apparatus of compulsion and coercion.

Congress should get the job done.

Law; an ordinance of reason for the common good, made by him who has care of the community.

The Law is one aspect of a much more concrete and encompassing relation than the relation between commanding and obeying that characterizes the imperative.

What I want to understand is what I am talking about on the stage. What I don't want to understand is what the government is talking about when the government tells me about taxes.

The backlash against Big Government is an encouraging sign of a growing resistance to the mission creep of federal power.

We have one authority and one law and everyone has the responsibility to follow that law and that authority.

The United States is the greatest law factory the world has ever known.

One could argue the GOP made no progress on limiting government in their four years of total control from 2002 to 2006. If anything, government expanded like never before.

Power tends to corrupt. But the power in Washington resides in Congress, if it wants to use it. It can do anything - it can stop the Vietnam War, it can make its will felt, if it can ever get its act together to do anything.

The essence of a free government consists in an effectual control of rivalries.

Look, I think by the time my case was over and other ones, everybody on both sides of the aisle in Congress said we can't run a government by this kind of process and they repealed the law and that's good.

The current constitutional law places the president of the republic in an embarrassing situation.

The art of government is the organisation of idolatry.

The issue is whether the ultimate civil authority of the United States can tolerate actions in contempt of constitutional lines of authority. Any lessening of civil power over military power must inevitably lead away from democracy.

And, Mr. Speaker, if the Governor and Council don't see fit to fall in with us, I say let the general duty law, and all, go to the devil, sir, and go about our business.

I don't want a government shutdown. I don't think anyone does.