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The Aboriginal Australians used to adopt dingo pups as pets. They’re cute when they’re little, but they inevitably mature into large and aggressive adult dingos. When this happened the Aboriginal Australians would quite wisely part ways with their former pets, sending them off into the outback to eat kangaroos and wombats and whatever else they could find.
The original Americans established a government based on freedom and liberty. At first, this government was small and non-threatening—incapable of preventing Canadians from burning down the White House, even. But over time the government grew into an “ungovernable” thing, which would put its citizens in cages for owning certain types of plants, failing to forfeit large parts of their incomes every year, and exposing any of the illegal things party members do on a daily basis.
The difference between Aboriginals and Americans is that Aboriginals had the good sense to send their dingos out into the outback, whereas Americans believe they can simply choose less vicious animals to bite them every year.
This is not to say that governmental tyranny hasn’t got plenty of fans. Advocates for collectivism are delighted by the notion of sending people to gulags for committing whichever acts the party does not like. They are mostly unconcerned that bureaucrats will begin losing their jobs in the event that gulags should begin to run below capacity. Constantly rising quotas invariably turn any country that contains a gulag into one giant gulag.
Most fans of the government aren’t so extreme. They see a little government control as a good thing. Sure, strangers can read your email, because you shouldn’t have anything to hide. Sure, the police can take your money through civil forfeiture.
“But who will build the roads?”
Statists consider this question the ultimate checkmate. If you’re one of them, do this: try building your own road, and then wait and see who comes to stop you.
Okay! Now that we have kindled a strong dislike of government in your heart, it’s on to the main attraction. We’ve put together a collection of our favorite quotes about government, which is to say they are all profoundly anti-government. It’s just the thing to start reading aloud during your next family Thanksgiving meal.
Quotes About Government Control and Totalitarian States
Isabel Paterson
“A tax-supported, compulsory educational system is the complete model of the totalitarian state.”
– Isabel Paterson, God of the Machine
Arcesilaus
“Where you find the laws most numerous, there you will find also the greatest injustice.”
Anne Applebaum
“Most of the people buying the Soviet paraphernalia were Americans and West Europeans. All would be sickened by the thought of wearing a swastika. None objected, however, to wearing the hammer and sickle on a T-shirt or a hat. It was a minor observation, but sometimes, it is through just such minor observations that a cultural mood is best observed. For here, the lesson could not have been clearer: while the symbol of one mass murder fills us with horror, the symbol of another mass murder makes us laugh.”
Jim Rohn
“Beware of those who seek to take care of you lest your caretakers become your jailers.”
– Jim Rohn, The Treasury of Quotes
George Washington
“However combinations or associations of the above description may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely, in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.”
– George Washington, speaking about the two-party political system in his Farewell Address, 1796
Anthony Gregory
“No self-respecting person who loves humanity or wishes for a world of greater equality and justice should have anything to do with whitewashing the slavery and extermination of Marxism-Leninism.”
Friedrich Nietzsche
“As little State as possible!”
– Friedrich Nietzsche, The Dawn of Day
Marie Beyle
“The shepherd always tries to persuade the sheep that their interests and his own are the same.”
Thomas Jefferson
“…to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical…”
Ayn Rand
“There is no difference between communism and socialism, except in the means of achieving the same ultimate end: communism proposes to enslave men by force, socialism – by vote. It is merely the difference between murder and suicide.”
– Ayn Rand, L.A. Times, September 2, 1962
“Either we believe that the State exists to serve the individual or that the individual exists to serve the State.”
– Ayn Rand
“…we are fast approaching the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it please, while the citizens may act only by permission.”
– Ayn Rand
Andrew Klavan
“Free people can treat each other justly, but they can’t make life fair. To get rid of the unfairness among individuals, you have to exercise power over them. The more fairness you want, the more power you need. Thus, all dreams of fairness become dreams of tyranny in the end.”
Frederich A. Hayek
“The more the state plans, the more difficult planning becomes for the individual.”
Noam Chomsky
“Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.”
– Noam Chomsky, Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda
Marquis de Sade
“Social order at the expense of liberty is hardly a bargain.”
Hannah Arendt
“Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.”
– Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
Edward R. Murrow
“A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves!”
Alexander de Tocqueville
“Democracy extends the sphere of individual freedom, socialism restricts it. Democracy attaches all possible value to each man; socialism makes each man a mere agent, a mere number. Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.”
Jordan Peterson
“We’ve got a hundred million corpses stacked up to demonstrate (the perils of statist ideology). Yet there are those who say that Stalin was a bad individual, a poor implementor. Same for Mao, Pol Pot, etc. The thing is, wherever it was tried the end consequence was always the same. I’ve heard this all many, many times: ‘That wasn’t real communism.’ You know what that means? That means that if I’d been the benevolent dictator in the place of a Stalin, a Mao or a Pol Pot, that it would’ve brought in utopia. There isn’t a more narcissistic and toxic and inexcusable statement that you can make.”
Adolf Hitler
“What luck for rulers, that men do not think.”
H.L. Mencken
“The kind of man who wants the government to adopt and enforce his ideas is always the kind of man whose ideas are idiotic.”
– H.L. Mencken, Minority Report
