Thomas Jefferson Quotes

Most governments are designed for the purposes of oppression and personal ambition.

Government by blackmail is incompatible with democracy.

Government is force, pure and simple. There's no way to sugar-coat that. And because government is force, it will attract the worst elements of society - people who want to use government to avoid having to earn their living and to avoid having to persuade others to accept their ideas voluntarily.

The shortest way to ruin a country is to give power to demogogues.

In a free government, the few, finding their schemes and views of interest borne down by the many, to gain the power they cannot constitutionally obtain, always endeavor to get it by cunning and corruption, conscious at the same time that usurpation, when once begun, the safety of the usurper consists only in grasping the whole.

Government is about stealing and nothing else. That's all it's ever been about. That's all it'll ever be about.

The essence of government is force, and most often that force is used to accomplish evil ends.

I find that government can be a kind of gangsterism and is in Russia. And is likely to be in America if we don't take care of ourselves pretty carefully.

Politicians as a class are dangerous, that people who are seeking power over us are not, by definition, our friends.

It is a matter of common knowledge that the government of South Carolina is under domination of a small ring of cunning, conniving men.

How soon the labor of men would make a paradise of the whole earth, were it not for misgovernment, and a diversion of all his energies from their proper object -- the happiness of man -- to the selfish interest of kings, nobles, and priests.

The chief bandit is the head of the state himself.

Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms [of government] those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations perverted it into tyranny.

… the tools of despotism and corruption

Aggression is simply another name for government. Aggression, invasion, government, are interconvertible terms. The essence of government is control, or the attempt to control. He who attempts to control another is a governor, an aggressor, an invader; and the nature of such invasion is not changed, whether it is made by one man upon another man, after the manner of the ordinary criminal, or by one man upon all other men, after the manner of an absolute monarch, or by all other men upon one man, after the manner of a modern democracy.

There is not upon the face of the earth today a government so utterly and shamelessly corrupt as that of the United States of America. There are others more cruel, more tyrannical, more devastating; there is none so utterly venal.

Donald Trump is many things - a tantrum-throwing man-child and a wannabe strongman pining for his very own banana republic among them - but perhaps most of all he is a giant, melon-colored distraction from what is happening to our country under his watch.

Government means politics, and interference by government carries with it always the implication of coercion. We may accept the expanding power of bureaucrats so long as we bask in their friendly smile. But it is a dangerous temptation. Today politics may be our friend and tomorrow we may be its victims.

Government is a kind of legalized pillage.

The coercive power of government is always a beacon to those who want to dominate others -- summoning the worst dregs of society to Washington to use that power to impose their will upon others.

The State is the coldest of all cold monsters.

The grossest, the cruelest, the most selfish, the most easily pervertible and perverted thing in this world, is government.

Throughout history government has served as a vehicle for the organization of hatred and oppression, benefiting no one except those who are ambitious and ruthless enough to gain control of it.

The policy of seeking values from human beings by means of force, when practiced by an individual, is called crime. When practiced by a government, it is called statism.

Force, governmental coercion, is the instrument by which the ethics of altruism - the belief that the individual exists to serve others - is translated into political reality.