Government Quotes - Page 14

Uncertainty is one of government recipes.

Government can only reign over a classes-divided society.

The order should not have been given,' she said. 'It was not done for the city but for your private ends.'I shook my head. 'There is no difference.'You believe that?'A Prince must, or he is no Prince.

John Christopher

Everything that he was saying sounded incredible, but Frank knew enough about politics to know that governments got away with what they did because they counted on ordinary citizens dismissing events as being too incredible and implausible.

Thrity Umrigar

It's every American's duty to support his government but not necessarily in the style to which it has become accustomed.

Thomas C. Mann

The good guys had to operate on a higher level than the killers--just for society to keep track of who was who.

Keith Ablow

Susan Margaret Collins was born on December 7, 1952 in Caribou, Maine and is presently the senior United States Senator from Maine. Senator Collins has served in the Senate since 1997 and chaired the Senate Committee on Homeland Security from 2003 to 2007. She now is the Chairwoman of the Senate Special Committee on Aging. Collins is a graduate of St. Lawrence University, a liberal arts college, in Canton, New York. Considered a moderate Republican, she became the only Republican in the U.S. Senate currently representing a state in New England. Her vote was one of three republican votes in the Senate that helped to defeat a bill designed to destroy the Affordable Health Care Program presently in effect. John McCain's heroic stand only mattered because Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski bravely stood by him! It was their courage that saved health care for approximately 22 million people.

Captain Hank Bracker

Capitalism is a social system where the health and security of a nation are compromised for corporate gain.

Suzy Kassem

A theory is like medicine (or government): often useless, sometimes necessary, always self-serving, and on occasion lethal. So it needs to be used with care, moderation and close adult supervision.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Better to live under one tyrant a thousand miles away, than a thousand tyrants one mile away.

Daniel Bliss

The state was made for man, not man for state.

Albert Einstein

Perhaps the most important thing I learned was about democracy, that democracy is not our government, our constitution, our legal structure. Too often they are enemies of democracy.

Howard Zinn

In fact, if law were restricted to protecting all persons, all liberties, and all properties; if law were nothing more than the organized combination of the individual's right to self-defense; if law were the obstacle, the check, the punisher of all oppression and plunder — is it likely that we citizens would then argue much about the extent of the franchise?

Frédéric Bastiat

Dictatorship, by whatever name, is founded on the doctrine that the individual amounts to nothing; that the State is the only one that counts; and that men and women and children were put on earth solely for the purpose of serving the state.

Harry Truman

The duty of the people is to tend to their own affairs.The duty of government is to help them do it.This is the pasta of politics.The inspired leader, the true prince, no matter how great, can only be sauce upon the pasta.--Bombolini

Robert Crichton

So, ignorant we are. But we're not stupid. Indeed...remaining ignorant about politics and our government is a perfectly rational response to the government we have. The question isn't what we know. The question is what we're capable of knowing, and doing, if we have the right incentives, and the right opportunity.

Lawrence Lessig

But having biologists outside the Beltway remained a problem for the adminisration. "They found they couldn't control us," Williams said... "That sort of thing just drove them up the wall. They were so used to saying 'do this,' and we'll just go away and do it. Never ask questions. The biologists had good connections with the press and national environmental group. "So eventually they said, 'Okay we're going to send you guys out to the hinterlands.'" The Regan administration began to dismantle the Endangered Species Office in D.C. Biologists have been working from regional offices ever since.

Joe Roman

How is the schoolmaster, the nation, to know which boy needs the whipping?

Woodrow Wilson

We never pray against our government or call down curses on them. Instead, we have learned that God is in control both of our own lives and the government we live under. God has used China's government for His own purposes, molding and shaping His children as He sees fit. Instead of focusing our prayers against any political system, we pray that regardless of what happens to us, we will be pleasing to God.

Brother Yun

I doubt that my sense of personal freedom is any stronger than anybody else's. I'm happy to respect authority when it's genuine authority, based on moral or intellectual or even technical superiority. I'm eager to follow a hero if we can find one. But I tend to resist or evade any kind of authority based merely on the power to coerce. Government, for example. The Army tried to train us to salute the uniform, not the man. Failed. I will salute the man, maybe, if I think he's worthy of it, but I don't salute uniforms anymore.

Edward Abbey

If government were a product, selling it would be illegal.

P.J. O'Rourke

Government is nothing more than the combined force of society or the united power of the multitude for the peace, order, safety, good, and happiness of the people... There is no king or queen bee distinguished from all the others by size or figure or beauty and variety of colors in the human hive. No man has yet produced any revelation from heaven in his favor, any divine communication to govern his fellow men. Nature throws us all into the world equal and alike... The preservation of liberty depends upon the intellectual and moral character of the people. As long as knowledge and virtue are diffused generally among the body of a nation it is impossible they should be enslaved. Ambition is one of the more ungovernable passions of the human heart. The love of power is insatiable and uncontrollable... There is a danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living wth power to endanger public liberty.

David McCullough

I need to say this – you shouldn't trust any government, actually including this one. You should not trust government – full stop. The natural inclination of government is to hoard power and information; to accrue power to itself in the name of the public good.

Nick Clegg

When our government is spoken of as some menacing, threatening foreign entity, it ignores the fact that, in our democracy, government is us.

Barack Obama

[Obamacare] was almost the perfect example of politics in the Bubble Era, where the time horizon for anyone with real power is always close to zero, long-term thinking is an alien concept, and even the most massive and ambitious undertakings are motivated entirely by short-term rewards. A radical reshaping of the entire economy, for two election cycles’ worth of campaign cash – that was what this bill meant. It sounds absurdly reductive to say so, but there’s no other explanation that makes any sense.

Matt Taibbi

Many, if not most, of the difficulties we experience in dealing with government agencies arise from the agencies being part of a fragmented and open political system…The central feature of the American constitutional system—the separation of powers—exacerbates many of these problems. The governments of the US were not designed to be efficient or powerful, but to be tolerable and malleable. Those who designed these arrangements always assumed that the federal government would exercise few and limited powers.

James Q. Wilson

A breath of laughter will blow a Government out of existence in Paris much more effectually than a whiff of cannon-smoke

Robert Barr

When there’s a vacuum of public input, lobbyists usually fill it. But when there’s public input, the people usually win.

Morgan Carroll

It is a false and dangerous situation which bases public power on private want, and roots the grandeur of the State in the suffering of the individual. It is a badly constituted grandeur which combines all the material elements, and into which no moral element enters.

Victor Hugo

The new America, instead, is fast becoming a vast ghetto in which all of us, conservatives and progressives, are being bled dry by a relatively tiny oligarchy of extremely clever financial criminals and their castrato henchmen in government, whose job is to be good actors on TV and put on a good show.

Matt Taibbi

Every time government attempts to handle our affairs, it costs more and the results are worse than if we had handled them ourselves.

Benjamin Constant

The source of our suffering has been our timidity. We have been afraid to think....Let us dare to read, think, speak, write.

David McCullough

The mistake our politicians so often make with these industry leaders is in thinking they are interested in, or respectful of, the power of government. All they want is to keep stealing. If you can offer them the government’s seal of approval on that, they’ll take it. But if you can’t, well, they’ll take that too.

Matt Taibbi

Anarchy is like custard cooking over a flame; it has to be constantly stirred or it sticks and gets heavy, like government.

Tom Robbins

Our lives are led, and our decisions made, within a network of needs and wants, some natural, some arising from the acts of others, some aggravated by the acts of the state. We are all bored, or threatened, or tantalized in differing degrees by a perilous world, some hostile people, and a not very sensitive government.

Carl Cohen

We're supposed to strive for harmony, and that's what the art of tea is supposed to accomplish... but harmony is very, very difficult to achieve in this country. Tea ceremony is powerless. But it's also not such a bad thing either. You should enjoy it while you can.

Koushun Takami

Let us never weary of repeating, that to think first of the disinherited and sorrowful classes; to relieve, ventilate, enlighten, and love them; to enlarge their horizon to a magnificent extent; to lavish upon them education in every shape; to set them an example of labor, and never of indolence; to lessen the weight of the individual burden by increasing the notion of the universal aim; to limit poverty without limiting wealth; to create vast fields of public and popular activity; to have, like Briareus, a hundred hands to stretch out on all sides to the crushed and the weak; to employ the collective power in the grand task of opening workshops for every arm, schools for every aptitude, and laboratories for every intellect; to increase wages, diminish toil, and balance the debit and credit--that is to say, proportion enjoyment to effort, and supply to demand; in a word, to evolve from the social machine, on behalf of those who suffer and those who are ignorant, more light and more comfort, is (and sympathetic souls must not forget it) the first of brotherly obligations, and (let egotistic hearts learn the fact) the first of political necessities.

Victor Hugo

Government is the right disposition of things.

Michel Foucault

Crawling out of the flophouseI saw the mayor stealing my junkI doth protest, citizen's arrestNow my body's in his trunkWhere's the shadow government when you need it?Where's the shadow government?It's a bad, bad world!

They Might Be Giants

Have you ever stopped to ponder the amount of blood spilt, the volume of tears shed, the degree of pain and anguish endured, the number of noble men and women lost in battle so that we as individuals might have a say in governing our country? Honor the lives sacrificed for your freedoms. Vote.

Richelle E. Goodrich

Strange that men, from age to age, should consent to hold their lives at the breath of another, merely that each in his turn may have a power of acting the tyrant according to the law! Oh, God! give me poverty! Shower upon me all the imaginary hardships of human life! I will receive them with all thankfulness. Turn me a prey to the wild beasts of the desert, so I be never again the victim of man, dressed in the gore-dripping robes of authority! Suffer me at least to call life, the pursuits of life, my own! Let me hold it at the mercy of the elements, of the hunger of the beasts, or the revenge of barbarians, but not of the cold-blooded prudence of monopolists and kings!

William Godwin

People have a hard time accepting free-market economics for the same reason they have a hard time accepting evolution: it is counterintuitive. Life looks intelligently designed, so our natural inclination is to infer that there must be an intelligent designer--a God. Similarly, the economy looks designed, so our natural inclination is to infer that we need a designer--a government. In fact, emergence and complexity theory explains how the principles of self-organization and emergence cause complex systems to arise from simple systems without a top-down designer.

Michael Shermer

The social organs are constituted so as to enable them to develop harmoniously in the grand air of liberty. Away, then, with quacks and organizers! Away with their rings, and their chains, and their hooks, and their pincers! Away with their artificial methods! Away with their social laboratories, their governmental whims, their centralization, their tariffs, their universities, their State religions, their inflationary or monopolizing banks, their limitations, their restrictions, their moralizations, and their equalization by taxation! And now, after having vainly inflicted upon the social body so many systems, let them end where they ought to have begun — reject all systems, and try of liberty — liberty, which is an act of faith in God and in His work

Frédéric Bastiat

The President and the Congress are all very well in their way. They can say what they think they think, but it rests with the Supreme Court to decide what they have really thought.

Theodore Roosevelt

One class. No masters. No slaves. No black. No white. No Jew. No Christian. One race-- The human race.

Edith Hahn Beer

(Patrick) Henry rightly understood that the moral condition of the American people was a direct product of their religious faith, and that politics and morality were inevitably intertwined. Thus, the political structure ultimately rested on a religious foundation. The "great pillars of all government and of social life, "Henry once observed, are virtue, morality, and religion.

David J. Vaughan

The best government is that which governs least.

John L. O'Sullivan

Folks can’t seem to realize that it isn’t a smooth talker we need in there but a steady man, a man with judgement. Any medicine-show man can spout words, if they are written for him. It takes no genius to sound well. To act right and at the right time is something else again.

Louis L'Amour

Once you sell people fear, they'll buy just about anything.

David Alejandro Fearnhead

Unless government appropriately regulates oil developments and holds oil executives accountable, the public will not trust them to drill, baby, drill. And we must!

Sarah Palin

Let us leave political questions to be decided by the powers concerned," Sir Ralph would say, "as we have adopted a form of government which forbids us to discuss our interests ourselves. If a nation is responsible for the faults of its legislature, what one can you find that is guiltier than yours?

George Sand

Without debate, without criticism no administration and no country can succeed and no republic can survive.

John F Kennedy

Humanity lived many years and ruled the earth, sometimes wisely, sometimes well, but mostly neither.

Catherynne M. Valente

If you start to smell some of the shit, you start smelling all of the shit

Doug Stanhope

The government cannot give to anybody anything that thegovernment does not first take from somebody else.

Adrian Rogers

Obviously these are some exceptional young people, but what they have in common is that they were ordinary people who cared. They wanted to act, to do something, to make life better for other people—and they have.

Morgan Carroll

The people's government, made for the people, made by the people and answerable to the people.January 1830

Daniel Webster

What all these lofty and vague phrases boil down to is that the court can impose things that the voters don't want and the Constitution does not require, but which are in vogue in circles to which the court responds.

Thomas Sowell

It is eminently possible to have a market-based economy that requires no such brutality and demands no such ideological purity. A free market in consumer products can coexist with free public health care, with public schools, with a large segment of the economy -- like a national oil company -- held in state hands. It's equally possible to require corporations to pay decent wages, to respect the right of workers to form unions, and for governments to tax and redistribute wealth so that the sharp inequalities that mark the corporatist state are reduced. Markets need not be fundamentalist.

Naomi Klein

To me, patriotism means dedication to the principles on which the country was founded and a willingness to stand firm and fight for these principles regardless of what the government says or does

Richard J. Maybury

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Government Quotes - Page 14

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