As quoted in Charting the Candidates '72 (1972) by Ronald Van Doren, p. 7
1940s–present
Context: The state — or, to make the matter more concrete, the government — consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office. Their principal device to that end is to search out groups who pant and pine for something they can't get and to promise to give it to them. Nine times out of ten that promise is worth nothing. The tenth time is made good by looting A to satisfy B. In other words, government is a broker in pillage, and every election is sort of an advance auction sale of stolen goods.
“You can have a revolution wherever you like, except in a government office; even were the world to come to an end, you'd have to destroy the universe first and then government offices.”
The Absolute at Large (1921)
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Karel Čapek 51
Czech writer 1890–1938Related quotes
“I have no ambition to govern men; it is a painful and thankless office.”
“The second office of the government is honorable and easy, the first is but a splendid misery.”
Letter to Elbridge Gerry (13 May 1797)
1790s
CNN Newsroom http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/200908040014, (August 4, 2009)
Speech at the public dinner at Fowler's Garden, Lexington, Kentucky, May 16, 1829, printed in Niles' Weekly Register, Vol. 36 (1829), at p. 399.
Inaugural address (1889)
Context: There is no constitutional or legal requirement that the President shall take the oath of office in the presence of the people, but there is so manifest an appropriateness in the public induction to office of the chief executive officer of the nation that from the beginning of the Government the people, to whose service the official oath consecrates the officer, have been called to witness the solemn ceremonial. The oath taken in the presence of the people becomes a mutual covenant. The officer covenants to serve the whole body of the people by a faithful execution of the laws, so that they may be the unfailing defense and security of those who respect and observe them, and that neither wealth, station, nor the power of combinations shall be able to evade their just penalties or to wrest them from a beneficent public purpose to serve the ends of cruelty or selfishness.
Source: "When You Live Next to an Autocracy" in The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020/12/china-democracy-mongolia/617391/ (15 December 2020)
“It is a disparagement of the Government, who put an ill man into office.”
Regina v. Langley (1703), 2 Raym. 1029.