Purpose Of Government Quotes

The fundamental purpose of government is to protect its citizens.

The purpose of government is to enable the people of a nation to live in safety and happiness. Government exists for the interests of the governed, not for the governors.

I am absolutely opposed to a national ID card. This is a total contradiction of what a free society is all about. The purpose of government is to protect the secrecy and the privacy of all individuals, not the secrecy of government. We don’t need a national ID card.

The purpose of government is for those who run it to plunder those who do not.

The state is or can be master of money, but in a free society it is master of very little else.

The most fundamental purpose of government is defense, not empire.

The sheer number of government employees and welfare recipients effectively transforms the purpose of government from maintaining order to confiscating as much as possible from vulnerable taxpayers.

The provisions we have made [for our government] are such as please ourselves; they answer the substantial purposes of government and of justice, and other purposes than these should not be answered.

The proper role of government is exactly what John Stuart Mill said in the middle of the 19th century in “On Liberty.” The proper role of government is to prevent other people from harming an individual. Government, he said, never has any right to interfere with an individual for that individual’s own good.

I believe that, as long as there is plenty, poverty is evil. Government belongs wherever evil needs an adversary and there are people in distress.

The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only object of good government.

Experience teaches us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government’s purposes are beneficent.

The purpose of government is to rein in the rights of the people.

The only legitimate purpose of government is to serve citizens, and … the only legitimate purpose of technology is to improve our lives, not to manipulate or enslave us.

I am more interested in the purpose of government than its mechanics-though the means should at least be good enough to lead to the ends desired.

Why has government been instituted at all? Because the passions of man will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint.

The good of the people must be the great purpose of government. By the laws of nature and of reason, the governors are invested with power to that end. And the greatest good of the people is liberty. It is to the state what health is to the individual.