Daniel Patrick Moynihan Government Quotations

A responsible government does not triple the national debt in eight years.

Irresponsibility breeds irresponsibility. The finances of government are so central. You'd think that would be pretty obvious.

...there is simply nothing so important to a people and its government as how many of them there are, whether their number is growing or declining, how they are distributed as between different ages, sexes, and different social classes and racial and ethnic groups, and again, which way these numbers are moving.

Secrecy is for losers. . . . It is time to dismantle government secrecy, this most persuasive of Cold War-era regulations. It is time to begin building the supports for the era of openness that is already upon us.

The American Constitution was designed to make it hard to have too much government.

In too many cases, if our Government had set out determined to destroy the family, it couldn't have done greater damage than some of what we see today.

Government cannot provide values to persons who have none, or who have lost those they had. It cannot provide inner peace. It can provide outlets for moral energies, but it cannot create those energies.

I'm a Democrat, and there are an important group of things only the government can do. But let us be clear that for most of the world, what they most need is less government.

The principal objective of American government at every level should be to see that children are born into intact families and that they remain so.

Somehow liberals have been unable to acquire from life what conservatives seem to be endowed with at birth: namely, a healthy skepticism of the powers of government agencies to do good.

The single most exciting thing you encounter in government is competence, because it's so rare.