On This Day

Samuel Langhorne Clemens - better known as Mark Twain - was born 30 November 1835 in Florida, Missouri (though he grew up in Hannibal, Missouri).

Here's a quote on government by him:

"..no country can be well governed unless its citizens as a body keep religiously before their minds that they are the guardians of the law and that the law officers are only the machinery for its execution, nothing more." - The Gilded Age

More curmudgeonly Twain quotes on government here.