The Government/Quotes

""A government is a body of people, usually notably ungoverned.""

- Shepherd Book, Firefly

"Jubal Harshaw: Well, who do you think did it? Jill: We know who did it, The Government! Jubal: Jill, "the government" is several million people. You'll have to be a little more precise."

- Stranger in A Strange Land

"If people behaved like governments, you'd call the cops."

- Kelvin Throop III

"I don't make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts."

- Will Rogers

"If the price that I must pay to obtain my freedoms, is to acknowledge that the Government was granted the power to infringe on them, then I am not free."

- Poul Anderson

"The most important question in the study of government is 'how can we prevent government from going berserk and killing off half the population?'"

- John Kormylo

"Whenever you have an efficient government, you have a dictatorship."

- Harry S. Truman

"Authority has always attracted the lowest elements in the human race. All through history, mankind has been bullied by scum. Those who lord it over their fellows and toss commands in every direction and would boss the grass in the meadow about which way to bend in the wind are the most depraved kind of prostitutes.  They will submit to any indignity, perform any vile act, do anything to achieve power.  The worst off-sloughings of the planet are the ingredients of sovereignty.  Every government is a parliament of whores.  The trouble is, in a democracy the whores are us."

- P.J. O'Rourke

"Don't tell my mother I work for the government. She thinks I'm a bouncer in a brothel."

"Government is like a baby. An alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other."

- Ronald Reagan

""Democracy is a form of government in which it is permitted to wonder aloud what the country could do under first-class management.""

- Senator Soaper

"Government is a shared myth. When the myth dies, the government dies."

- Frank Herbert

"The government -- it's not just your Big Brother, it's that kid down the block who likes to beat you up and take your lunch money."

- Michael Rawdon

""...Government is staffed with mostly well-intentioned but incompetent people... Conspiracy theorists reverse this: They think government is evil-intentioned but supremely competent. That's crazy-talk, Count Chocula.""

- Jonah Goldberg, National Review Online, September 13, 2006

""In the U. S. Government, there is a lot more incompetence and a lot less conspiracy than is generally believed.""

- a NASA spokesperson

"Government is that organization that claims to have the right to kill you."

- Mike Halbrook