“The ideally non-violent state will be an ordered anarchy. That State is the best governed which is governed the least.”

1960s, Special message to Congress on the right to vote (1965)
Context: The essence of our American tradition of State and local governments is the belief expressed by Thomas Jefferson that Government is best which is closest to the people. Yet that belief is betrayed by those State and local officials who engage in denying the right of citizens to vote. Their actions serve only to assure that their State governments and local governments shall be remote from the people, least representative of the people's will and least responsive to the people's wishes.

Motto of United States Magazine and Democratic Review. First used in introductory essay by editor John L. O'Sullivan in the premier issue (October, 1837, p. 6 http://books.google.com/books?id=HGtJAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA6&dq=%22governs+least%22). Attributed to Jefferson by Henry David Thoreau, this statement is cited in his essay on civil disobedience, but the quote has not been found in Jefferson's own writings. It is also commonly attributed to Thomas Paine, perhaps because of its similarity in theme to many of his well-documented expressions such as "Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one."
Misattributed
Variant: "That government is best which governs least"; reported in Paul F. Boller, Jr., and John George, They Never Said It: A Book of Fake Quotes, Misquotes, & Misleading Attributions (1989), p. 56

Quotes 1990s, 1990–1994, Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media, 1992

Oui, l'anarchie c'est l'ordre; car, le gouvernement c'est la guerre civile.
Bellegarrigue is often credited with first using the slogan "Anarchy is order, government is civil war" in 1848; it may have been derived from Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's expression, in What is Property? An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government (1840): "As man seeks justice in equality, so society seeks order in anarchy."
Anarchist Manifesto (1850)

Anarchy (1891) http://www.marxists.org/archive/malatesta/1891/xx/anarchy.htm
Context: Anarchy is a word that comes from the Greek, and signifies, strictly speaking, "without government": the state of a people without any constituted authority.
Before such an organization had begun to be considered possible and desirable by a whole class of thinkers, so as to be taken as the aim of a movement (which has now become one of the most important factors in modern social warfare), the word “anarchy” was used universally in the sense of disorder and confusion, and it is still adopted in that sense by the ignorant and by adversaries interested in distorting the truth.

Quote, First State of the Union Address (1865)
Context: Certainly the Government of the United States is a limited government, and so is every State government a limited government. With us this idea of limitation spreads through every form of administration — general, State, and municipal — and rests on the great distinguishing principle of the recognition of the rights of man. The ancient republics absorbed the individual in the state — prescribed his religion and controlled his activity. The American system rests on the assertion of the equal right of every man to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, to freedom of conscience, to the culture and exercise of all his faculties. As a consequence the State government is limited — as to the General Government in the interest of union, as to the individual citizen in the interest of freedom.

1770s, Common Sense (1776)
Context: Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries BY A GOVERNMENT, which we might expect in a country WITHOUT GOVERNMENT, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer.

Source: The Long-Legged House