“Governments, by their nature, are instruments of privilege.”

Source: The Wealth of Nations (1776), Book V, Chapter I, Part III, p. 862.
Context: Fear is in almost all cases a wretched instrument of government, and ought in particular never to be employed against any order of men who have the smallest pretensions to independency.

The Roots of American Order (1974)

On Publicity http://books.google.com/books?id=AusJAAAAIAAJ&q="Secresy+is+an+instrument+of+conspiracy+it+ought+not+therefore+to+be+the+system+of+a+regular+government"&pg=PA315#v=onepage from The Works of Jeremy Bentham volume 2, part 2 (1839)

Music is a Prayer:An interview with Hariprasad Chaurasia by Ian Gottstein

On the Completion of the Bunker Hill Monument (1843)
Context: Standing armies are the oppressive instruments for governing the people, in the hands of hereditary and arbitrary monarchs. A military republic, a government founded on mock elections and supported only by the sword, is a movement indeed, but a retrograde and disastrous movement, from the regular and old-fashioned monarchical systems. If men would enjoy the blessings of republican government, they must govern themselves by reason, by mutual counsel and consultation, by a sense and feeling of general interest, and by the acquiescence of the minority in the will of the majority, properly expressed; and, above all, the military must be kept, according to the language of our Bill of Rights, in strict subordination to the civil authority.

“Dying for Obama’s Deadly Dogma,” https://jungefreiheit.de/author/ilana-mercer/ Junge Freiheit, October 17, 2014
2010s, 2014

First published in Truthout http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/38360-trump-in-the-white-house-an-interview-with-noam-chomsky on 14 November 2016. Then published in the book Optimism over Despair in 2017, page 125 (ISBN 9780241981979).
Quotes 2010s, 2016
Context: One of the great achievements of the doctrinal system has been to divert anger from the corporate sector to the government that implements the programs that the corporate sector designs, such as the highly protectionist corporate/investor rights agreements that are uniformly mis-described as "free trade agreements" in the media and commentary. With all its flaws, the government is, to some extent, under popular influence and control, unlike the corporate sector. It is highly advantageous for the business world to foster hatred for pointy-headed government bureaucrats and to drive out of people's minds the subversive idea that the government might become an instrument of popular will, a government of, by and for the people.

Source: The Street Lawyer

Statement to the Court (1886)