The Deterioration of Government

The deterioration of every government begins with
the decay of the principles on which it was founded
~Charles-Louis de Secondat

• “If the public are bound to yield obedience to laws to which they cannot give their approbation, they are slaves to those who make such laws and enforce them.” ~Candidus (1772)
  

• “The Army (considering the irritable state it is in, its suffering and composition) is a dangerous instrument to play with.” ~George Washington (1783)
  

• “Space is there and we’re going to climb it, and the moon and planets are there and new hopes for knowledge and peace are there. And, therefore, as we set sail we ask God’s blessing on the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked.” ~President John Kennedy, 1962
  

• “Men and women must prevail over the endless agencies and bureaus that would reduce human beings to computerized abstractions and program people into numbers and statistics. Today’s mounting danger is from mass government … we must not let them prevail . . . Never forget that in America our sovereign is the citizen . . . The state is a servant . . . It must never become an anonymous monstrosity that masters everyone.” ~President Gerald Ford
  

• “I see a century … which equips young men and women … to make their own decisions rather than permit their future to be programmed by massive government structures that an imaginative writer foresaw for 1984 — a nightmarish fantasy of what our third century could be. It is my deepest conviction that a government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.” ~Gerald Ford, (1974)
  

• “The Constitution is the supreme law of our land and it governs our actions as citizens. Only the laws of God, which govern our consciences, are superior to it. As we are a Nation under God, so I am sworn to uphold our laws with the help of God.” ~Gerald Ford
  

• “People say … why don’t you expand that program, why don’t you spend more Federal money? . . . I don’t think they have understood one of the fundamentals . . . I look them in the eye and I say, ‘Do you realize that a government big enough to give us everything we want is a government big enough to take from us everything we have?'” ~President Gerald Ford, March 11, 1976
  

• “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will. Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue till they have resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they suppress.” ~Frederick Douglass (1818-1895)
  

• “If Congress can do whatever in their discretion can be done by money, and will promote the General Welfare, the Government is no longer a limited one, possessing enumerated powers, but an indefinite one, subject to particular exceptions.” ~James Madison (1792)
  

• “We lay it down as a fundamental, that laws, to be just, must give a reciprocation of right; that, without this, they are mere arbitrary rules of conduct, founded in force, and not in conscience.” ~Thomas Jefferson (1782)