Yip Harburg Quotes

Government is about stealing and nothing else. That's all it's ever been about. That's all it'll ever be about.

The grossest, the cruelest, the most selfish, the most easily pervertible and perverted thing in this world, is government.

I find that government can be a kind of gangsterism and is in Russia. And is likely to be in America if we don't take care of ourselves pretty carefully.

It is a matter of common knowledge that the government of South Carolina is under domination of a small ring of cunning, conniving men.

Either force or corruption has been the principle of every modern government.

They were both obnoxious, drunk with their power …. they were the hatchet men of the Nixon administration, the killers, the psychopaths in residence

He is a weak ruler who needs religion to uphold his government; it is as if he would catch his people in a trap.

Government has within it a tendency to abuse its powers.

Throughout history government has served as a vehicle for the organization of hatred and oppression, benefiting no one except those who are ambitious and ruthless enough to gain control of it.

The House Rules Committee is perhaps the free world's outstanding bureaucratic abomination - a tiny, airless closet deep in the labyrinth of the Capitol where some of the very meanest people on earth spend their days cleaning democracy like a fish.

I think the American government is now the most corrupt government in the world.

The American people might have a criminal syndicate running their government.

Surveillance changes history. We know this through examples of corrupt presidents like Nixon.

I suspect there have been a number of conspiracies that never were described or leaked out. But I suspect none of the magnitude and sweep of Watergate.

Most governments are designed for the purposes of oppression and personal ambition.

Evidence that has surfaced has cast a black cloud of distrust over our entire society. Our citizens do not know whom to believe, and many of them have concluded that all the processes of government have become so compromised that honest government has been rendered impossible.

The real cost of corruption in government, whether it is local, state, or federal, is a loss of the public trust.

If I had to use a single word to describe what is fundamentally wrong with government today, I would use the word fraud.

The government spokesman announces that there is no truth in the charges of widespread corruption within the Cabinet; nobody believes him; he knows that nobody believes him, we know that he knows it, and he knows it too.

Government means politics, and interference by government carries with it always the implication of coercion. We may accept the expanding power of bureaucrats so long as we bask in their friendly smile. But it is a dangerous temptation. Today politics may be our friend and tomorrow we may be its victims.

Truth is suppressed, not to protect the country from enemy agents but to protect the Government of the day against the people.

Rulers who wished to subvert the public liberty, may have found an established Clergy convenient auxiliaries. A just Government instituted to secure & perpetuate it needs them not.

All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities.

The clinical definition of "fascism" is when private concentrated economic power takes government away from the people, turns government into a guarantor, a subsidizer, a covering of corporate power.

When a government controls both the economic power of individuals and the coercive power of the state ... this violates a fundamental rule of happy living: Never let the people with all the money and the people with all the guns be the same people.