#Government

"One of the most productive ways a government can spend money on the people is by building more prisons. That’s what makes the US so great. That’s what freedom is all about."

"But, Jefferson worried that the people - and the argument goes back to Thucydides and Aristotle - are easily misled. He also stressed, passionately and repeatedly, that it was essential for the people to understand the risks and benefits of government, to educate themselves, and to involve themselves in the political process. Without that, he said, the wolves will take over."

"I question the equation like an equestrian, and I realize it’s horseshit. What is the equation? Vote=Change."

"Some people grow vegetables by day, but I grow shadows by night. Right now my only customer is the US government, but the profit is unbelievable."

"I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves ; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power."

"My hobbies include rubbing my nipples across a cheese grater, meeting cat ladies on Tinder, and voting for either Democrat or Republican every four years. You could say I am a torture enthusiast."

"Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage."

"Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance. No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby."

"I guess I'm just an old mad scientist at bottom. Give me an underground laboratory, half a dozen atom-smashers, and a beautiful girl in a diaphanous veil waiting to be turned into a chimpanzee, and I care not who writes the nation's laws."

"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."

"Nine out of ten politicians are thieves. The tenth politician is a liar, and the one who conducted the survey."

"Governments, if they endure, always tend increasingly toward aristocratic forms. No government in history has been known to evade this pattern. And as the aristocracy develops, government tends more and more to act exclusively in the interests of the ruling class -- whether that class be hereditary royalty, oligarchs of financial empires, or entrenched bureaucracy."

"Can America get back to a point where politicians are honest? Not unless that point is the tip of a sword."

"In a well-functioning democracy, the state constitution is considered more important than God's holy book, whichever holy book that may be, and God matters only in your private life."

"The government will see that human spaceflight is useful - for science and the economy - and inspirational."

"Economic power is exercised by means of a positive, by offering men a reward, an incentive, a payment, a value; political power is exercised by means of a negative, by the threat of punishment, injury, imprisonment, destruction. The businessman's tool is values; the bureaucrat's tool is fear."

"The COUNTRY is controlled by LAWS>LAWS are controlled by POLITICIANS>POLITICIANS are controlled by VOTERS>VOTERS are controlled by PUBLIC OPINION>PUBLIC OPINION is controlled by the MEDIA (News, Hollywood, Internet...) & EDUCATIONso. whoever controls MEDIA & EDUCATION, controls the COUNTRY."

"People wishes their friends to be in politics, but their sons in professions."

"If it is believed that these elementary schools will be better managed by the governor and council or any other general authority of the government, than by the parents within each ward, it is a belief against all experience."

"People shouldn't be afraid of their government. Governments should be afraid of their people."