Government Excess Quotes

The American taxing structure, the purpose of which was to serve the people, began instead to serve the insatiable appetite of government. If you will forgive me, you know someone has once likened government to a baby. It is an alimentary canal with an appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.

In no place, even Paris, was the social part of the government carried to such excess.

The worst excesses of the Congress of the 1980s pale in comparison with what is going on in Washington today.

I'm a conservative because I believe we're here on this earth to do a little more than crawl through life, comfortable in the cradle of government excess and oblivious to the duties required to keep this republic standing.

The first thing you need to know, in order to establish some perspective and avoid panic, is that the violent government excesses we're seeing today are far from unprecedented.

The use of torture on suspected terrorists after Sept. 11 has already earned a place in American history's hall of shame, alongside the Alien and Sedition Acts, Japanese internment during World War II, and the excesses of the McCarthy era.

The Declaration [of Independence] was not a protest against government, but against the excess of government. It prescribed the proper role of government, to secure the rights of individuals and to effect their safety and happiness. In modern society, no individual can do this alone. So government is not a necessary evil but a necessary good.

The American political machinery is awesome to behold in its scale and expense and waste and madness. It's the greatest circus on Earth I suppose.

Does the U.S. Constitution stand for anything in an era of government excess? Can that founding document, which is supposed to restrain the power and reach of a centralized federal government, slow down the juggernaut of czars, health insurance overhaul and anything else this administration and Congress wish to do that is not in the Constitution?

We are staring down the Federal government gun barrel of a runaway Federal Congress—absolutely runaway.

Not only does a bureaucracy tend to under-government in point of quality; it tends to over-government in point of quantity.