How do You View Your Government?

Here is how Thomas Paine: Society in every state is a blessing, but government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one.

Thomas Jefferson: Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms [of government] those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.

The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.

That government is best which governs the least, because its people discipline themselves.

Thomas Edison: There is far more danger in public than in private monopoly, for when Government goes into business it can always shift its losses to the taxpayers. Government never makes ends meet, and that is the first requisite of business.

Louis D. Brandeis: Our government... teaches the whole people by its example. If the government becomes the lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. Louis D. Brandeis

Larry Flynt: Majority rule only works if you're also considering individual rights. Because you can't have five wolves and one sheep voting on what to have for supper.

Sydney H. Harris: Democracy is the only system that persists in asking the powers that be whether they are the powers that ought to be.

Abraham Lincoln: No man is good enough to govern another man without that other's consent.

George Washington: Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.

Lewis Mumford: The way people in democracies think of the government as something different from themselves is a real handicap. And, of course, sometimes the government confirms their opinion.

However, Karl Marx states: The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them.

I view government at best a servant assigned by the public to serve and protect its interest. At worst, the government becomes a tyrannical master with the citizens his slaves.

Now my fellow reader, how do you view governments?