Harry Browne Quotes

My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.

I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size.

I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.

But make no mistake, the President will find in our new majority the voice of the American people as they've expressed it tonight: standing on principle, checking Washington's power and leading the drive for a smaller, less costly, and more accountable government.

We just simply want to get back to basics, get - restore essentially the constitutional foundation of the country, and that means the federal government becoming less onerous, less involved in every - basically every item of our lives. And what that means is there does have to be some transition.

I believe that smaller government is better government. But I also believe that in the areas where government does play a legitimate role, we should demand that it is done better.

Someone has to stay on the line and say, no, we can do this by cutting spending and reducing the size of government. That's what I was committed to doing.

We want to reduce the size of government in half as a percentage of GNP over the next 25 years. We want to reduce the number of people depending on government so there is more autonomy and more free citizens.

Big government doesn't work! It just doesn't work!

The future is not Big Government. Self-serving politicians. Powerful bureaucrats. This has been tried, tested throughout history. The result has always been disaster. President Obama, your agenda is not new. It's not change, and it's not hope.

No one has yet succeeded in reducing the size or scope of the federal government.

I don’t want to eliminate government. I just want to shrink it down to the size that you can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the tub.

I don’t want to kill the government. I just want to shrink it down to a small enough size that I can flush it down the toilet.

I will support vigorously whoever commits to reduce the size of government the most.

If you think shrinking government and getting it less involved in your life is a hallmark of tyranny it is only because you are either grotesquely ignorant or because you subscribe to a statist ideology that believes the expansion of the state is the expansion of liberty.

Every Republican will tell you they are for school choice, shrinking government, cutting the government workforce and getting rid of Common Core. But talk is cheap. Talk is just talk. I haven't just talked about these things. I've actually done these things.

We do not believe that if you cut back what government does you diminish its authority. On the contrary, a government that did less, and therefore did better, would strengthen its authority.

I wish it were possible to obtain a single amendment to our Constitution. I would be willing to depend on that alone for the reduction of the administration of our government; I mean an additional article taking from the Federal Government the power of borrowing.

I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size. I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them. It is not to inaugurate new programs, but to cancel old ones that do violence to the Constitution, or that have failed in their purpose, or that impose on the people an unwarranted financial burden. I will not attempt to discover whether legislation is "needed" before I have first determined whether it is constitutionally permissible.

The worst thing the federal government could do is to increase the size, reach and cost of government. If government failed in its response to the hurricane, the answer is not more inefficient government.

Talk about threats to national security -- how about government so big, so complicated and so unmanageable, it cant get out of its own way?

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

I'm a Democrat, and there are an important group of things only the government can do. But let us be clear that for most of the world, what they most need is less government.

I have more government than I want, more government than I need, more government than I can afford.

The request of industry to government is as modest as that of Diogenes to Alexander: Get out of my light.