With governments at every level back from their summer recesses, it is only apropos to commend for their review some classic quotes about governing and those chosen to govern:
Ronald Reagan offered how you can tell the difference between a communist and an anti-communist. The communist is “someone who reads Marx and Lenin,” he quipped. The anti-communist is “someone who understands Marx and Lenin.”
We would be remiss not to include Regan’s classic – quite wry — assessment of government, “summed up in a few short phrases”: “If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.”
Per Calvin Coolidge, “Don’t expect to build up the weak by pulling down the strong.”
Then there’s this: “Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees the others,” said Aristotle.
As Ambrose Bierce noted, “Democracy is four wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.”
Russell Kirk reminded that “Every right is married to a duty” and that “every freedom owes a corresponding responsibility.”
“The conservative approach,” Barry Goldwater noted, “is nothing more or less than an attempt to apply the wisdom and experience and the revealed truths of the past to the problems of today. The challenge is not to find new or different truths, but to learn how to apply established truths to the problems of the contemporary world.”
Said H.L. Mencken: “Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule — and both commonly succeed, and are right.”
From Tacitus: “The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.”
From Plato: “The heaviest penalty for declining to rule is to be ruled by someone inferior to yourself.”
From Euripides: “When one with honeyed words but evil mind persuades the mob, great woes befall the state.”
Garet Garret offered that “There is in government a living impulse to extend itself indefinitely; and there is in freedom a necessity to resist that impulse.”
And, oh, the prescience of Thomas Jefferson: “I predict future happiness for Americans, if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.”
Our “leaders,” those elected and those appointed by them in supporting roles, must never forget that they are not the people’s bosses, the people are their bosses.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
