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"How much more reasonable is it to say with the sage Plato, that the perfect happiness of a state consists in the subjects obeying their prince, the prince obeying the laws, and the laws being equitable and always directed to the good of the public?"
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"I never knew a government yet that wanted to do anything."
"Every form of government tends to perish by excess of its basic principle."
"Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. People have the right to expect that these wants will be provided for by this wisdom."
"I found this national debt, doubled, wrapped in a big bow waiting for me as I stepped into the Oval Office."
"The United States Constitution has proved itself the most marvelously elastic compilation of rules of government ever written."
"No more distressing moment can ever face a British government than that which requires it to come to a hard, fast and specific decision."
"I don't mind what Congress does, as long as they don't do it in the streets and frighten the horses."
"A democratic government is the only one in which those who vote for a tax can escape the obligation to pay it."
"Democracy is the form of government that gives every man the right to be his own oppressor."
"There shall be no end to the government of God."
Explore more quotes by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
"They say that Caliph Omar, when consulted about what had to be done with the library of Alexandria, answered as follows: 'If the books of this library contain matters opposed to the Koran, they are bad and must be burned. If they contain only the doctrine of the Koran, burn them anyway, for they are superfluous.' Our learned men have cited this reasoning as the height of absurdity. However, suppose Gregory the Great was there instead of Omar and the Gospel instead of the Koran. The library would still have been burned, and that might well have been the finest moment in the life of this illustrious pontiff."
"All wickedness comes from weakness. The child is wicked only because he is weak. Make him strong, he will be good. He who could do everything would never do harm."
"What, then, is the government? An intermediary body established between the subjects and the sovereign for their mutual communication, a body charged with the execution of the laws and the maintenance of freedom, both civil and political."
"When something an affliction happens to you, you either let it defeat you, or you defeat it."
"Are your principles not engraved in all hearts, and in order to learn your laws is it not enough to go back into oneself and listen to the voice of one's conscience in the silence of the passions? There you have true philosophy. Let us learn to be satisfied with that, and without envying the glory of those famous men who are immortalized in the republic of letters, let us try to set between them and us that glorious distinction which people made long ago between two great peoples: one knew how to speak well; the other how to act well."
"Those that are most slow in making a promise are the most faithful in the performance of it."
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