"The Night Watchman State has been replaced by Highway Robber States – governments in which no asset, no contract, no domain is safe from the fleeting whim of politicians."

James Bovard Literature See all quotes by James Bovard →

React to this quote

More by James Bovard

“The worse government fails, the less privacy citizens supposedly deserve.”

“Trusting government nowadays means dividing humanity into two classes: those who can be trusted with power to run other people’s lives, and those who cannot even be trusted to run their own lives.”

“A lie that is accepted by a sufficient number of ignorant voters becomes a political truth.”

“People have been taught to expect far more from government than from freedom.”

“We need a constitutional amendment to make the federal government obey the Constitution.”

“The Patriot Act treats every citizen like a suspected terrorist and every federal agent like a proven angel.”

Resonant Thoughts

"Overload could be regarded as a kind of inter-sender conflict in which various role senders may hold quite legitimate expectations that a person perform a wide variety of tasks, all of which are mutua…"

— Robert L. Kahn

Literature1923–1970

#friendship

"The importance of an event is inversely proportional to the space which the newspapers devote to it."

— Nicolás Gómez Dávila

Philosophy1913–1994

#politics

"The trial of Jesus of Nazareth, the trial and rehabilitation of Joan of Arc, any one of the witchcraft trials in Salem during 1691, the Moscow trials of 1937 during which Stalin destroyed all of the f…"

— Katherine Anne Porter

Literature1890–1980

#truth

"I can't hold out any longer and am in a state of utter despair. After a few days of good weather, it's raining again and once again I have had to put the studies I started to one side. It's driving me…"

— Claude Monet

Art1840–1926

#art