Government Quotes

We - you and I, and our government - must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering for our own ease and convenience the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage.

In the councils of government we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

People want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it.

The true purpose of education is to prepare young men and women for effective citizenship in a free form of government.

We are many things. We are liberal - for we do believe that, in judging his own daily welfare, each citizen, however humble, has greater wisdom than any government, however great.

Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history.

I just don't believe that Americans, 163 [million] intelligent Americans, are going to be satisfied either with the action or with such a distinct trend toward centralization and paternalism in our Government that it becomes difficult to detect it from a socialistic form.

I believe we should be conservative. I believe we should conserve on everything that is basic to our system. We should be dynamic in applying it to the problems of the day so that all 163 million Americans will profit from it.

I will continue to strive and struggle to apply what I think are conservative principles to the modern problems that we have so that not only in our legislative and governmental processes, but so far as I can help bring it about in our thinking processes, we will come to see the benefit of what I call the middle-of-the-road Government.

The adherence to conservative principles in the finances of the Government, in the relationship of the Government to the individual, to the State and to the locality... do demand different actions on the part of Government than were so in the past. Now that is what I am trying to do, and I will keep trying.

We believe in the principle that governments are properly established only when it is with the consent of the governed.

In many ways, from cutting budget, reducing expenses, keeping down, for example, in every field that I know, we have tried to be on the conservative, middle-of-the-road side. But that has not apparently been publicized sufficiently.

We must make it our business to explain what we mean by middle-of-the-road government [dynamic conservatism]. This is the courageous, the constructive path that all of us must take.

We are deeply unified in our support of basic principles: our belief in stability in our financial structure, in our determination we must have fiscal responsibility, in our determination not to establish and operate a paternalistic sort of government where a man's initiative is almost taken away from him by force.

I believe that the United States as a government, if it is going to be true to its own founding documents, does have the job of working toward that time when there is no discrimination made on such inconsequential reason as race, color, or religion.

The hunger for peace is too great, the hour in history too late, for any government to mock men's hopes with mere words and promises and gestures.

The governments principally involved, to the extent permitted by elementary prudence, should begin now and continue to make joint contributions from their stockpiles of normal uranium and fissionable materials to an international atomic energy agency.

If the use of local police powers had been sufficient, our traditional method of leaving the problems in those hands would have been pursued. But when large gatherings of obstructionists made it impossible for the decrees of the Court to be carried out, both the law and the national interest demanded that the President take action.

Let's do in the federal Government only those things that people themselves cannot do at all, or cannot so well do in their individual capacities.

The Founders conceived government as the servant, not the master of the individual.