Famous Quotes

"Concerns about the size and role of government are what seem to leave reformers stammering and speechless in town-hall meetings. The right wants to have a debate over fundamental principles elected Democrats seem incapable of giving it to them."

Thomas Frank on Government

More quotes about Government

• "A wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circlue of our felicities."

  Thomas Jefferson on Government

• "The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter."

  Winston Churchill on Government

• "I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country."

  Thomas Jefferson on Government

• "Government is not reason it is not eloquent it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master."

  George Washington on Government

• "Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil in its worst state, an intolerable one."

  Thomas Paine on Government

More quotes by Thomas Frank

• "We have become a society that can't self-correct, that can't address its obvious problems, that can't pull out of its nosedive. And so to our list of disasters let us add this fourth entry: we have entered an age of folly that - for all our Facebooking and the twittling tweedle-dee-tweets of the twitterati - we can't wake up from."

• "Liberal that I am, I support health-care reform on its merits alone. My liberal blood boils, for example, when I read that half of the personal bankruptcies in this country are brought on, in part, by medical expenses."

• "Back in the days when the market was a kind of secular god and all the world thrilled to behold the amazing powers of private capital, the idea of privatizing highways and airports and other bits of our transportation infrastructure made a certain kind of sense."

• "Former President Bill Clinton, who is widely regarded as a political mastermind, may have sounded like a traditional liberal at the beginning of his term in office. But what ultimately defined his presidency was his amazing pliability on matters of principle."

• "The great fear that hung over the business community in the 1970s was death by regulation, and the great goal of the conservative movement, as it rose to triumph in the 1980s, was to remove that threat - to keep OSHA, the EPA, and the FTC from choking off entrepreneurship with their infernal meddling in the marketplace."