Government Evolution Quotes

The House of Representatives, which was closer to the population, had much less power. The executive was more or less an administrator, not an emperor like today.

The Federal government we have today is unimaginable in the perspective of the Americans who debated the ratification of the original constitution.

The best form of government is one that is dying, because that means it’s giving way to something else.

Governments, if they endure, always tend increasingly toward aristocratic forms. No government in history has been known to evade this pattern. And as the aristocracy develops, government tends more and more to act exclusively in the interests of the ruling class -- whether that class be hereditary royalty, oligarchs of financial empires, or entrenched bureaucracy.

I do believe that General Washington had not a firm confidence in the durability of our government. He was naturally distrustful of men, and inclined to gloomy apprehensions; and I was ever persuaded that a belief that we must at length end in something like a British constitution, had some weight in his adoption of the ceremonies of levees, birthdays, pompous meetings with Congress, and other forms of the same character, calculated to prepare us gradually for a change which he believed possible, and to let it come on with as little shock as might be to the public mind.

The scope of a modern government has been widened far beyond the principles laid down by the old “laissez faire” school of political writers, and this widening has met popular approval.

Not one country in existence today has had the same borders and government for as long as two hundred years. The world will continue changing.

The evolution of government from its medieval, Mafia-like character to that embodying modern legal institutions and instruments is a major part of the history of freedom. It is a part that tends to be obscured or ignored because of the myopic vision of many economists, who persist in modeling government as nothing more than a gigantic form of theft and income redistribution.

There may have been somewhere, as a few eighteenth-century philosophers dreamed, a group of peaceful men who got together one evening after work and drew up a Social Contract to form the state. But nobody has been able to find an actual record of it. Practically all the governments whose origins are historically established were the result of conquest-of one tribe by another, one city by another, one people by another. Of course there have been constitutional conventions, but they merely changed the working rules of governments already in being.

Laws are the DNA of government. They must evolve with time.

Government is not a mechanical but a living thing and must be interpreted in a Darwinian sense …

Is a democracy, such as we know it, the last improvement possible in government? Is it not possible to take a step further towardsrecognizing and organizing the rights of man?

The first was a government of priestcraft, the second of conquerors, and the third of reason.

The stability of modern governments above the ancient, and the accuracy of modern philosophy, have improved, and probably will still improve, by similar gradations.

Now, a lot of people have given up on government. And if you're one of those people, I would ask that you reconsider, because things are changing. Politics is not changing; government is changing.

If the condition of Government stands still, it just makes no sense and must die, so, therefore, the improvement within that democracy must be the greater and greater equalization of rights and opportunities to the people as those people grow up.