William F. Buckley, Jr. Government Quotations

The best defense against usurpatory government is an assertive citizenry.

I'd rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.

We have got to accept Big Government for the duration-for neither an offensive nor a defensive war can be waged, given our present government skills, except through the instrument of a totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores. … And if they deem Soviet power a menace to our freedom (as I happen to), they will have to support large armies and air forces, atomic energy, central intelligence, war production boards, and the attendant centralization of power in Washington-even with Truman at the reins of it all.

Earlier this month the State Department gave the umpteenth performance of its popular play, Please Tread on Me, with Ceylon as guest star, and the usual cast.

The government of the United States, under Lyndon Johnson, proposes to concern itself over the quality of American life. And this is something very new in the political theory of free nations. The quality of life has heretofore depended on the quality of the human beings who gave tone to that life, and they were its priests and its poets, not its bureaucrats.

Government can't do anything for you except in proportion as it can do something to you.

...following Mrs. Roosevelt in search of irrationality was like following a burning fuse in search of an explosive.

People are beginning to wish that the voters had been given breathometer tests when they voted in the present government.

Only government can cause inflation, preserve monopoly, and punish enterprise.