The object of government is the welfare of the people. The material progress and prosperity of a nation are desirable chiefly so far as they lead to the moral and material welfare of all good citizens.
If ever this free people, if this Government itself is ever utterly demoralized, it will come from this incessant human wriggle and struggle for office, which is but a way to live without work.
Let only individuals contribute - with sensible limits per election. Otherwise, we are well on our way to ensuring that a government of the moneyed, by the moneyed, and for the moneyed shall not perish from the earth.
The notion that the church, the press, and the universities should serve the state is essentially a Communist notion. In a free society these institutions must be wholly free - which is to say that their function is to serve as checks upon the state.
Just look at that Forbes 400. Takes a billion three to get on the Forbes 400 this year. And the aggregate wealth is just staggering. And those people are paying less percentage of their total income to the federal government than their receptionists are. [...] I'll bet a million dollars against any member of the Forbes 400 who challenges - me that the average for the Forbes 400 will be less than the average of their receptionists.
We want to go in for suffering, and there may be torture. If we put the women in front the Government may hesitate to inflict on us all the penalty that they might otherwise inflict.
America is addicted to oil and increasing amounts of this oil comes from abroad. Some of the nations we depend on for oil have unstable governments or are hostile towards the United States.
Once more: there are three offices according to whose directions the highest magistrates are chosen in certain states - guardians of the law, probuli, councilors - of these, the guardians of the law are an aristocratical, the probuli an oligarchical, the council a democratical institution.
The National Government will regard it as its first and foremost duty to revive in the nation the spirit of unity and cooperation. It will preserve and defend those basic principles on which our nation has been built. It regards Christianity as the foundation of our national morality, and the family as the basis of national life.
[N]o country can be well governed unless its citizens as a body keep religiously before their minds that they are the guardians of the law and that the law officers are only the machinery for its execution, nothing more.
We should use this public sphere and redefine - beyond China's borders - what a government is allowed to do, where its powers end and where the realm of a citizen's privacy begins.