James Madison Quotes

Nothing for the Left, nothing the government does is ever about its superficial reason; it's only and always about expanding government power and control over you.

They need to review this secret world. We have an incredibly powerful government that gets on automatic pilot.

What an augmentation of the field for jobbing, speculating, plundering, office-building and office-hunting would be produced by an assumption of all the state powers into the hands of the general government.

In order to rally people, governments need enemies. They want us to be afraid, to hate, so we will rally behind them. And if they do not have a real enemy, they will invent one in order to mobilize us.

Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear--kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor-with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it

Whenever you hear, “it’s for your own good” from the government, you are about to lose some money or freedom. Always!

Rulers who wished to subvert the public liberty, may have found an established Clergy convenient auxiliaries. A just Government instituted to secure & perpetuate it needs them not.

Whenever the government is involved, there is an element of coercion.

The entire Nazi war machine was only possible because of past, present and future violations of the non aggression principle (achievable only through government).

[D]ecade after decade, through taxes and regulations, governments at all levels took ever-increasing control over people's lives, wealth, and property. The control grew exponentially, decade after decade. The rationale was that the control was necessary -- for society, for the poor, for the nation, even for freedom itself. Americans continued living their life of the lie: they continued believing that the more control government exercised over their lives and property, the freer they became.

The governments of the great States have two instruments for keeping the people dependent, in fear and obedience: a coarser, the army; and a more refined, the school.

Governments show thus how successfully men can be imposed on, even impose on themselves, for their own advantage.

That there may happen cases in which the national government may be necessitated to resort to force, cannot be denied.

He is a weak ruler who needs religion to uphold his government; it is as if he would catch his people in a trap.

Go back to bed America, your government is in control again. Go back to bed America... you are free to do as we tell you... you are free to do as we tell you.

There can be no such thing as "limited government," because there is no way to control an entity that in principle enjoys a monopoly of power.

The Statist has an insatiable appetite for control. His sights are set on his next meal even before he has fully digested his last. He is constantly agitating for government action. And in furtherance of that purpose, the Statist speaks in the tongue of the demagogue, concocting one pretext and grievance after another to manipulate public perceptions and build popular momentum for the divestiture of liberty and property from its rightful possessors.

Governments want efficient technicians, not human beings, because human beings become dangerous to governments – and to organized religions as well. That is why governments and religious organizations seek to control education.

The founders of our nation feared paper currency because it gave government the means to steal from its citizens.

There is nothing government can give you that it hasn't taken from you in the first place.

The corporations have become our government. They're not just influential. Department by department, you name it, they put their people in high government positions, they have 10,000 PACs and 35,000 lobbyists, so there's no more opening to be heard.

Politics is a fascinating game, because politics is government. It is the art of government.

To blindly trust government is to automatically vest it with excessive power. To distrust government is simply to trust humanity - to trust in the ability of average people to peacefully, productively coexist without some official policing their every move. The State is merely another human institution - less creative than Microsoft, less reliable than Federal Express, less responsible than the average farmer husbanding his land, and less prudent than the average citizen spending his own paycheck.

That's a Roman concept where the government can do anything, as long as you give the people "bread and circuses." And I'd say this culture right now is similar, as long as people have money, fun, and food, our government can do heinous, heinous things.

The state must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people. As long as the government is perceived as working for the benefit of the children, the people will happily endure almost any curtailment of liberty and almost any deprivation.