Quotes about Government

Almost all the prosperity of a public society and civil community does, under God, depend on their rulers. They are like the main springs or wheels in a machine that keep every part in their due motion, and are in the body politic, as in the vitals in the body natural, and as the pillars and the foundation in a building.

In the book I define conservatism, as I believe it is fit upon four categories of principle: respect for The Constitution, respect for life, less government, and personal responsibility.

Faith is either something that informs one at all times or it isn't anything at all, really. When the Chinese government tells its citizens that they can worship in a certain building on a certain day, but once they leave that building they must bow to the secular orthodoxy of the state, you have a cynical lie at work. They've substituted a toothless "freedom of worship" for "freedom of religion".

Some problems cannot be cured through legislation. But they must be attended to nonetheless. And here's the problem: The less the culture attends to these things, the more the government will attend to them and the less freedom there will be.

As nations become corrupt and vicious," he says, "they have more need of masters." The root of the word "vicious" is "vice"—the word simply means "full of vice." So Franklin, without feeling the need to explain himself much, is bluntly saying that "freedom requires virtue." And that less virtue inevitably begets less freedom.

We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

Real faith is never something that can be forced by the state. It's something that either be encouraged and smiled upon or discouraged and frowned-upon.

Democracy without real patriotism moves toward the destruction of the ordered liberty bequeathed to us by the founders.

That is what religious liberty was and is. The government essentially said, Yes, be religious. We will not only tolerate it; we will respect it and we will encourage it. But we cannot take sides or put our thumbs on the scales. But the understanding of this has been lost to many in modern America.

A state which which includes within itself a terrorized Church has lost its most faithful servant.

Governments do not govern, but merely control the machinery of government, being themselves controlled by the hidden hand.

The world is weary of statesmen whom democracy has degraded into politicians.