Garet Garrett Quotes

If the great Government of the United States were a private corporation no bank would take its name on a piece of paper, because it has cynically repudiated the words engraved upon its bonds.

Business is in itself a power.

Revolution in the modern case is no longer an uncouth business.

Never was it [Capitalism] imposed on life as a system, or at all. It grew out of life, not all at once but gradually, and is therefore one of the great natural designs. When it was found and identified by such men as Adam Smith, who wrote its bible, and Karl Marx, who wrote its obituary too soon, it was already working.

There are those who still think they are holding the pass against a revolution that may be coming up the road. But they are gazing in the wrong direction. The revolution is behind them. It went by in the Night of Depression, singing songs to freedom.

The New Deals enmity for that system of free and competitive private enterprise which we call capitalism was fundamental.

The idea of imposing universal peace on the world by force is a barbarian fantasy.

Formerly government was the responsibility of people; now people were the responsibility of government.

Loyalty of the law-making power to the executive power was one of the dangers the political fathers foretold.

It is the function of the President, representing the executive principle, to execute the laws.

The spectacle of a great, solvent government paying a fictitious price for gold it did not want and did not need and doing it on purpose to debase the value of its own paper currency was one to astonish the world.

You do not defend a world that is already lost.

There was endless controversy as to whether the acts of the New Deal did actually move recovery or retard it, and nothing final could ever come of that bitter debate because it is forever impossible to prove what might have happened in place of what did.

Between government in the republican meaning, that is, Constitutional, representative, limited government, on the one hand, and Empire on the other hand, there is mortal enmity.

Is it security you want? There is no security at the top of the world.

The New Deal was going to redistribute the national income according to ideals of social and economic justice.

The winds that blow our billions away return burdened with themes of scorn and dispraise.

No government can provide social security. It is not in the nature of government to be able to provide anything. Government itself is not self-supporting. It lives by taxation. Therefore, since it cannot provide for itself but by taking toll of what the people produce, how can it provide social security for the people?

There is in government a living impulse to extend itself indefinitely; and there is in freedom a necessity to resist that impulse.

Government is the natural enemy of freedom.

We have crossed the boundary that lies between Republic and Empire. If you ask when, the answer is that you cannot make a single stroke between day and night: the precise moment does not matter. There was no painted sign to say: 'You are now entering Imperium.' Yet it was a very old road and the voice of history was saying: 'Whether you know it or not, the act of crossing may be irreversible.' And now, not far ahead, is a sign that reads: 'No U-turns.'

Well, where there is freedom doubt itself must be free.

Lenin, the greatest theorist of them all, did not know what he was going to do after he had got the power.

If people cannot limit government they will not for long be free.

There is a long history of monetary experience. It tells us that government is at heart a counterfeiter and therefore cannot be trusted to control money, and that this is true of both autocratic and popular government.

With no notice to the American people...this country entered the war...Stranger than the fact was the passive acceptance of it.

If you put a ten dollar bill under the rug instead of spending it, that is capital formation. It represents ten dollars' worth of something that might have been immediately consumed, but wasn't.

To the revolutionary mind the American vista must have been almost as incredible as Genghis Khan's first view of China - so rich, so soft, so unaware.

This is the problem for which revolutionary theory has yet to find the right solution, if there is one. The difficulty is that the economic interests of the two classes are antagonistic.