Government Failure Quotes

Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. It is in vain to say that democracy is less vain, less proud, less selfish, less ambitious, or less avaricious than aristocracy or monarchy. It is not true, in fact, and nowhere appears in history. Those passions are the same in all men, under all forms of simple government, and when unchecked, produce the same effects of fraud, violence, and cruelty.

The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem.

Some governments are corrupt but are known for their competency in running the city. Others are incompetent but are considered "clean." [Washington] DC's government is scandalously corrupt and hopelessly incompetent.

All modes of government are failures. Despotism is unjust to everybody, including the despot, who was probably made for better things. Oligarchies are unjust to the many, and ochlocracies are unjust to the few. High hopes were once formed of democracy; but democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people. It has been found out. I must say that it was high time, for all authority is quite degrading. It degrades those who exercise it, and degrades those over whom it is exercised.

To politicians, solved problems represent a dire threat - of unemployment and poverty. That's why no problem ever tackled by the government has ever been solved. What they want is lots of problems they can promise to solve, so that we'll keep electing them - or letting them keep their jobs in a bureaucracy metastasizing like cancer.

Experience shows that the most dangerous moment for a bad government is usually just as its starting on reform.

The welfare state has always been judged by its good intentions, rather than its bad results.

Government is not the answer to the problem - it IS the problem.

If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there'd be a shortage of sand.

Markets are smart and governments are dumb.

History has tried hard to teach us that we can't have good government under politicians.

The inescapable truth is: government does not have all the answers. In too many instances, government does not solve problems; it subsidizes them.

The people are getting screwed In this country.

Nothing turns out to be so oppressive and unjust as a feeble government.

Of all the numerous forms that governments have taken over the centuries, of all the concepts and institutions that have been tried, none has succeeded in keeping the State in check. The problem of the State is evidently as far from solution as ever.

Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary, cruel, grasping and unintelligent.

Local government is a gamble that can have disastrous consequences when it fails.

Our government has become incompetent, unresponsive, corrupt. And that incompetence, ineptitude, lack of accountability is now dangerous.

There are so many things that we could do to change the world in so many aspects. There are people working in nonprofit organizations, tackling the issues that we so desperately need to face, while governments fail so appallingly.

The worst affected from corruption is the common man.

The Fed was largely responsible for converting what might have been a garden-variety recession, although perhaps a fairly severe one, into a major catastrophe. Instead of using its powers to offset the depression, it presided over a decline in the quantity of money by one-third from 1929 to 1933 ... Far from the depression being a failure of the free-enterprise system, it was a tragic failure of government.

To govern Italy is not only impossible, it is useless.

George W. Bush let people die on rooftops in New Orleans because they were black and poor.

[Describing out tax system:] ... a disgrace to the human race.

Bob Levinson was in Iran serving his government, and Bob Levinson was not well served by his government.