Democracy is based on the assumption that a million men are wiser than one man. How's that again? I missed something. -- Robert A. Heinlein, Notebooks of Lazarus

Democracy is a device that insures we shall be governed no better than we deserve. -- George Bernard Shaw

Democracy is three wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.

They worked, we whined, they won. -- James Carville

Government [is] an illusion the governed should not encourage. -- John Updike, Couples

Government, the last bastion of the mediocre. -- Everyone (?)

Thank God we don't get all the government we pay for. -- Milton Friedman

Freedom of the press is for those who happen to own one.

In public policy, it matters less who has the best arguments and more who gets heard -- and by whom. -- Ralph Reed (Bush campaign adviser, former exec of the Christian Coalition), from a memo about Enron

Peace, n.: In international affairs, a period of cheating between two periods of fighting. -- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

Any government will work if authority and responsibility are equal and coordinate. This does not insure "good" government; it simply insures that it will work. But such governments are rare -- most people want to run things but want no part of the blame. This used to be called the "backseat-driver syndrome." -- Robert A. Heinlein, Notebooks of Lazarus

Anyone who considers protocol unimportant has never dealt with a cat. -- R. Heinlein

Each time a man stands up for an ideal
Or acts to improve the lot of others
Or strikes out against injustice
He sends forth a tiny ripple of hope.
-- Robert F. Kennedy, 1966 (?)

[P]eace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none. -- Thomas Jefferson, his inauguration (?)

[America] goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. -- John Quincy Adams (?)

The first responsibility of any bureaucracy is the preservation of itself. The second is to expand its responsiblities. -- Mort Halperin: Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy, The Brooking Institute, Washington, DC 1974 (?)

When you have an efficient government, you have a dictatorship. -- Harry Truman

There is no act of treachery or mean-ness of which a political party is not capable; for in politics there is no honour. -- Benjamin Disraeli, Vivian Grey

... and every time we allow the government to grow in power at the expense of the people, we put ourselves in jeopardy of losing the ability to free ourselves of them if it goes too far. -- Thomas Jefferson