Political Quotes

“it would be just 16 years since I came to the Senate floor to speak to a large new idea in our politics which seemed to me was then taking shape and which, as I do believe, has since become a central fact of American government. This was the idea on the part of those who legitimately, from their perspective, felt that the U.S. Government had become too large, too interfering, too dominant in the affairs of the State and local governments, and in general moving in a direction that this group did not desire. They spoke to the futility of seeking to dismantle the great edifice of Government that had been growing, not truly since the New Deal, but since the beginning of the century with the administrations of Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and thereafter, of course, President Franklin Roosevelt, President Johnson, President Nixon --a growth in Government that had never been fully accepted by all parts of the electorate, nor need it have been, and now was attaining very considerable opposition. The effort to reverse this direction by repealing this statute and amending that and reducing this program and such was not so much countervailing as beyond the capacities of the legislature. Indeed, the Government had attained to a size and complexity that dismantling even a small part of it was a huge enterprise. So the reasoning of this new school was that this would never succeed.…”