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"The growth of modern constitutional government compels for its successful practice the exercise of reason and considerate judgment by the individual citizens who constitute the electorate."
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"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."

"The United States Constitution has proved itself the most marvelously elastic compilation of rules of government ever written."

"I don't mind what Congress does, as long as they don't do it in the streets and frighten the horses."

"I believe there is something out there watching us. Unfortunately, it's the government."

"I am concerned about the whole man. I am concerned about what the people, using their government as an instrument and a tool, can do toward building the whole man, which will mean a better society and a better world."

"You measure a government by how few people need help."

"I don't make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts."

"Americans accept that gangsters are running the government."

"A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul."
Explore more quotes by Elihu Root

"Claims of right and insistence upon obligations may depend upon treaty stipulations, or upon the rules of international law, or upon the sense of natural justice applied to the circumstances of a particular case, or upon disputed facts."

"Secretary of War Stanton used to get out of patience with Lincoln because he was all the time pardoning men who ought to be shot."

"The law of the survival of the fittest led inevitably to the survival and predominance of the men who were effective in war and who loved it because they were effective."

"Honest people, mistakenly believing in the justice of their cause, are led to support injustice."

"The methods of peace propaganda which aim at establishing peace doctrine by argument and by creating a feeling favorable to peace in general seem to fall short of reaching the springs of human action and of dealing with the causes of the conduct which they seek to modify."

"It is not uncommon in modern times to see governments straining every nerve to keep the peace, and the people whom they represent, with patriotic enthusiasm and resentment over real or fancied wrongs, urging them forward to war."

"Nothing is more important in the preservation of peace than to secure among the great mass of the people living under constitutional government a just conception of the rights which their nation has against others and of the duties their nation owes to others."

"The point of departure of the process to which we wish to contribute is the fact that war is the natural reaction of human nature in the savage state, while peace is the result of acquired characteristics."
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