Grover Cleveland Quotes

The idea of the state is, or should be, a very limited, prescribed idea. The state looks after the defense of the realm, and other matters - raising revenue to pay for things which are for all of us, and so on. That idea has turned turtle now. The state isn't any longer perceived as an institution which exists to serve us.

It is perfectly true that that government is best which governs least. It is equally true that that government is best which provides most.

Did somebody dream there is some way that the government doesn't need us?

Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. People have the right to expect that these wants will be provided for by this wisdom.

The reason the government sells the census as your ticket to getting goodies - rather than as your civic duty - is that distributing goodies is now all the government does.

My concept of government's role in people's lives is that it is limited but legitimate, and essential when people have nowhere else to turn.

The function of government is to direct the physical and moral powers of the nation toward the end for which the commonwealth has come into being.

The role of government is to protect the public health.

We need government to do for the people what they cannot do for themselves.

There's a lot of stuff out there that government shouldn't do.

I know a lot about what government does do, can do, should do.

I thought the function of the government was to promote the general welfare, not to provide it.

As taxpayers, we pay our elected officials to serve the people and protect our state and our interests.

Elections do have consequences, and those we elect and far too often re-elect have forgotten how government works and for whom they work for, and that an ever growing, power hungry state and federal government are not the answer to the problem, but 80% of the time are the problem.

The government doesn't have to solve everyone's problem here.

We need a Federal government that does what the government needs to do and stops doing what the government ought not to be doing.

We must never forget what government is not. Government is not a philanthropic organization. Government is not the family. And government certainly is not the church.

And government's only role is to secure our rights for us.

The function of government is to provide you with service; the function of the media is to supply the Vaseline.

The great object of the civil government is the improvement of those who are members of the civil compact.

Government is a trust, and the officers of the government are trustees; and both the trust and trustees are created for the benefit of the public.

People have increasingly come to regard the government as a source of rights rather than as a defender of pre-existing individual rights.

The only orthodox object of the institution of government is to secure the greatest degree of happiness possible to the general mass of those associated under it.

That’s the function of government—to do for people what they cannot do for themselves.

Government becomes a burden only when it functions on behalf of the poor.