“If you don't get everything you want, think of the things you don't get that you don't want.”
“If you ask me what I want, I'll tell you. I want everything.”
Gerald Ford in a Presidential address to a joint session of Congress (12 August 1974)
Ford has also been quoted as having made a similar statement many years earlier, as a representative to the US Congress: "If the government is big enough to give you everything you want, it is big enough to take away everything you have."
"If Elected, I Promise…" : Stories and Gems of Wisdom by and About Politicians (1960) p. 193
Unsourced variants attributed to Goldwater include:
A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away.
Remember that a government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take away everything you have.
However, Karl Hess, a speechwriter for Goldwater, quoted Goldwater as having "repeatedly" said during the 1964 campaign that "the government strong enough to give you what you want is strong enough to take it all away." See The Death of Politics http://fare.tunes.org/books/Hess/dop.html, a Playboy article from 1969.
Misattributed
Presidential address to a joint session of Congress (12 August 1974)
Ford has also been quoted as having made a similar statement many years earlier, as a representative to the US Congress: "If the government is big enough to give you everything you want, it is big enough to take away everything you have."
"If Elected, I Promise…" : Stories and Gems of Wisdom by and About Politicians (1960) p. 193
Similar assertions have often been attributed to Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. Some of the inspiration for such expressions may lie in "The Criminality of the State" by Albert Jay Nock in American Mercury (March 1939) where he stated: "You get the same order of criminality from any State to which you give power to exercise it; and whatever power you give the State to do things for you carries with it the equivalent power to do things to you."
1970s, Address to Congress (12 August 1974)
Attributed to Reagan from informal remarks to reporters 10 October 1984,and to students and faculty at St. John's University 28 March 1985.[citation needed] The statement was made a decade earlier by Gerald Ford in an address to a Joint Session of the Congress, 12 August 1974. It is sometimes attributed to Thomas Jefferson and Barry Goldwater.
Similar assertions have often been attributed to Barry Goldwater. Some of the inspiration for such expressions may lie in "The Criminality of the State" by Albert Jay Nock in American Mercury (March 1939) where he stated: "You get the same order of criminality from any State to which you give power to exercise it; and whatever power you give the State to do things for you carries with it the equivalent power to do things to you."
Misattributed
Variant: A government that is big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take everything you have.
“You cannot be anything you want to be. But you can be everything God wants you to be.”
Source: Cure for the Common Life : Living In Your Sweet Spot (2005), p. 18
“You don't get everything you want. A dictatorship would be a lot easier.”
Responding to the difficulties of governing Texas, "The Taming of Texas," Governing Magazine (July 1998) http://www.governing.com/archive/1998/jul/bush.txt; also cited in Is our Children Learning?: The Case Against George W. Bush (2000) by Paul Begala.)
1990s
“You can have everything in life that you want if you just give enough other people what they want.”
Secrets of Closing the Sale (1984)
Variant: You can get everything in life you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want.
