Quotes about government

In 1891 the Brazilian Minister of Finance decreed the abolition of history he ordered the destruction of every document which dealt in any way with slavery or the slave trade a nation-wide burning of the books.

Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.

Money equals power power makes the law and law makes government.

The value of government to the people it serves is in direct relationship to the interest citizens themselves display in the affairs of state.

Like it or not, Google and the Chinese government are stuck in a tense, long-term relationship, and can look forward to more high-stakes shadow-boxing in the netherworld of the world's most elaborate system of censorship.

I've never dealt with the Russian government, I've never had a relationship with the Russian government.

Apple and Google want to create encryption for which they could not provide you the key. Their business model will not survive if the American government has a special relationship with them that requires them to surrender this kind of information.

So the American government lied to the Native Americans for many, many years, and then President Clinton lied about a relationship, and everyone was surprised! A little naive, I feel!

American official policy is that Egypt is an ally of the United States. Of course, we recognize that Egypt has gone through a dramatic change in government. And what their status will be going forward in terms of the relationship with our nation is something which which I'm sure will be developing over time.

I hope there have been times when I made you all proud, or made you all smile or at least piqued your interest in this wonderful institution we call government.

The Viennese wash everything. Where else in the world does the government hire public servants to wash public telephone booths and the glass over traffic lights? Every time I see someone doing these things, I smile like a child.

There is a real sense of anger among many people who are married that the government, any government, thinks it has the ability to change the definition of an institution like marriage.

Insurgents have capitalized on popular resentment and anger towards the United States and the Iraqi government to build their own political, financial and military support, and the faith of Iraqi citizens in their new government has been severely undermined.

There's very little dislike of Americans in the world, shown by repeated polls, and the dissatisfaction - that is, the hatred and the anger - they come from acceptance of American values, not a rejection of them, and recognition that they're rejected by the U.S. government and by U.S. elites, which does lead to hatred and anger.

The idea that the law should punish what is rude; that government should protect our tender sensibilities from those who would - quite often with shallow motivations but sometimes with deeper and more serious complaints - challenge our national certainties and rituals, should alarm and anger us.

Anger is wonderful. It keeps you going. I'm angry about bankers. About the government.

I've been in government and politics my entire career, and while I try to keep a level head and a reasonable tone in my commentary, even I can lose my head sometimes and let anger bubble over and burst out. It feels gross, looks ugly, and leaves a lasting mark.

Our government is printing money, and it's degrading the living standard of every person in America. It's the cause of frustration, anger, and confusion.

When the Left agitates over government policies, it's considered righteous anger. When the Right - and much of the center - agitate, it's painted as the rantings of the criminally and violently insane.

Of course we need to show we are a genuine alternative to an unpopular, Conservative-led government. But we need to set ourselves a higher standard than a party offering anger like UKIP.

Despite massive evidence to the contrary, libertarians hold tight to their romantic concept of capitalism, which, freed from government interference, serves the consumer with the best products at the lowest prices.

They think they’re runnin’ the country but all they’re doin’ is writin’ the reports.” From Homesteader Finding Sharon by D.M. McGowan

The settlers, as we know, are the only people in Israel who take the Left seriously. When you read the settlers' publications, you think that the leftists are everywhere: The leftists infiltrate the government, the leftists run the Defense Ministry, the leftists dominate the legal establishment, and the leftists control the media, of course.

It is indefensible that IRS Commissioner Koskinen has not been held accountable for failing to meet his legal obligations. This is exactly what the American people are tired of when they say that our government is on the wrong track.

Congress has an obligation to clear the legal fog by passing my bill to require the federal government to obtain a warrant if it wants to conduct aerial surveillance.

If the court strikes down the Defense of Marriage Act, is that a 'liberal' result enabling gay couples married in states where gay marriage is legal to enjoy the same economic advantages that federal laws now grant to straight couples? Or is it a 'conservative' ruling, limiting the federal government's ability to override state power?

The 'Total Information Awareness' project is truly diabolical - mostly because of the legal changes which have made it possible in the first place. As a consequence of the Patriot Act, government now has access to all sorts of private and commercial databases that were previously off limits.

The more expansive government is, the more perils people face in daily lives, be it from IRS agents or from child support services, or from other agencies that often have little or no legal restraints on their power.

History has shown us that, on extraordinarily rare occasions, it becomes necessary for the federal government to intervene on behalf of individuals whose 14th Amendment rights to legal due process and equal protection may be violated by a state.

I wish the government and the Minister of Justice would address these legal and constitutional arguments, but they refuse to. They want Canadians to go blindly into their brave new world, but it is not wise for a society to move blindly in any direction.

The Singaporean government, which represents legal migrant workers in employment disputes and claims of exploitation, requires that they stay in the country until the disputes are settled. If they leave, their claims are closed.

The kingdom of God is an order of government established by divine authority. It is the only legal government that can exist in any part of the universe.

The duty of government is to leave commerce to its own capital and credit as well as all other branches of business, protecting all in their legal pursuits, granting exclusive privileges to none.

Any new legal measures, or cooperative arrangements between government and companies meant to keep people from organizing violence or criminal actions, must not be carried out in ways that erode due process, rule of law and the protection of innocent citizens' political and civil rights.

Embryonic stem cell research is legal in America, and nothing in the administration's current policy affects that legality; 400 lines are currently being used to conduct embryonic stem cell research, both in the private sector and by the Federal Government.

Of the judicial department of the Government, the Supreme Court is the head and representative, and to it must come for final decision all the great legal questions which may arise under the Constitution, the laws, or the treaties of the United States.

Being under the microscope meant I was never given any slack. I still managed to screw up plenty in life, mind you, but in the things I really cared about - the legal work, or the stories I was telling as a writer, or the office I built in government - I wasn't left a lot of margin for error. It's kept me driven.

When the Soviet Union fell, optimistic scholars believed the world had shifted inexorably in the direction of free markets and liberal democracy. Instead, the West gradually embraced bigger government and weaker social bonds, creating a fragmented society in which the only thing we all belong to, as President Barack Obama puts it, is the state.

I don't have an issue with whether - from a legal standpoint, with whether or not government can impose the ultimate punishment on people. We do it in capital cases. Police officers shoot fleeing felons.

There isn't much question that the person who obtained the WikiLeaks cables from a classified U.S. government network broke U.S. law and should expect to face the consequences. The legal rights of a website that publishes material acquired from that person, however, are much more controversial.

The NSA has different reporting requirements for each branch of government and each of its legal authorities.

We believe that government in Britain is there to protect people from terrorism and from the worst criminality, but never at the expense of our civil liberties and the basic tenets of our legal system.

Disclosure of private e-mails from government officials has been a legal issue in many states.

I propose that the government should get out of the business of marrying people and, instead, only give legal status to civil unions.

Hillary Clinton is in political trouble and perhaps even legal trouble over her use of private e-mail accounts and bypassing government-issued accounts containing substantial amounts of information that belongs to the federal government. But ultimately, I don't think this latest controversy will hurt her presidential ambitions.

I'd worked in the state senate in college and seen how important legal decisions were. And at the last minute, Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison said, 'Why don't you come do an internship?' That turned into almost 15 years in the government, in the White House, and at the State Department.

The Chinese have always enjoyed gambling, and Macau is the only place in Greater China where gambling is legal. So I believe the government understands that there has to be a place for it.

Liberty has never come from Government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of it. The history of liberty is a history of limitations of governmental power, not the increase of it.

Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up, and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable - a most sacred right - a right, which we hope and believe, is to liberate the world.

Ask anyone on Social Security if their check comes on time every month. Like clockwork. And it comes through the so-called dilapidated U.S. mail. My dad's check literally will come on the same day every month. The government has been quite good and efficient at creating a number of systems.

Men promise freedom while establishing laws God promises laws while establishing freedom.

We have always trusted the control of our doomsday devices to the “key” elected of our nations.The current “interests” reorganizing the world now transcend the interests of nations.So these weapons will only be launched to serve interests other than that of the nations that launch themHence the “key” elected…

Democratic government needs parties parties do not need democracy.

We trust people's lives to randomly selected juries as the only fair method should we use any less fair method for a nation or a planet?

Why has it seemed that the only way to protect the environment is with heavy-handed government regulation?

There is no better example of the overreach of government than in environmental law.

I'm a latecomer to the environmental issue, which for years seemed to me like an excuse for more government regulation. But I can see that in rich societies, voters are paying less attention to economic issues and more to issues of the spirit, including the environment.

I thought I was gonna be an attorney, so I went to Dartmouth and I was a government major and I minored in environmental policy, and I didn't do anything academically around the arts.

What we mean by an outcome will naturally depend on the context. Thus, for a government charged with delivering public goods, an outcome will consist of the quantities provided of such goods as intercity highways, national defense and security, environmental protection, and public education together with the arrangements by which they are financed.

I think the government has to reposition environment on top of their national and international priorities.

We created the Cabinet Committee on the Environment to review the environmental implications of all government initiatives. I think what made us successful was the fact that it was a sustained approach. We did something new every year.

When the government undertakes or approves a major project such as a dam or highway project, it must make sure the project's impacts, environmental and otherwise, are considered. In many cases, NEPA gives the public its only opportunity to be heard about the project's impact on their community.

Nature is not simply a technical or economical resource, and human beings are not mere numbers. To suggest that one can somehow align all the squabbling institutions of science, environmental management, government and diplomacy in an alliance of convenience to regulate the global climate seems to me optimistic.

China's environmental conundrums will not be solved by changes within government alone. New mechanisms are needed to allow the communities which may be affected by a given plan, and citizens concerned about the environment, to join in.

That is the problem with governments these days. They want to do things all the time they are always very busy thinking of what things they can do next. That is not what people want. People want to be left alone to look after their cattle.

No government ought to be without censors and where the press is free no one ever will.

It is not the function of our Government to keep the citizen from falling into error it is the function of the citizen to keep the Government from falling into error.

He who steals a belt buckle pays with his life he who steals a state gets to be a feudal lord.

Poverty can be brought about by law it cannot be forbidden by law.

I always said a good despotism was the best form of government and I am twice as much in favour of it now I see what a quorum is!

The world is ruled by cowards and cravens brave men have put them there.

It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.

You just sit there and tolerate it, the same way everything in this country is tolerated. Every deception, every lie, every bullet in the brains. Just as you are already tolerating bullets in the brains that will be implemented only after the bullet is put in your brains.

He told us that nations of men fell into disorder, so nations of law were set up instead. He told us that nations of law then forgot justice and let the law become a Game, a Game in which the moves and the winning were more important than truth. He told us to seek justice rather than the Game.

Privacy is a protection from the unreasonable use of state and corporate power. But that is, in a sense, a secondary thing. In the first instance, privacy is the statement in words of a simple understanding, which belongs to the instinctive world rather than the formal one, that some things are the province of those who experience them and not naturally open to the scrutiny of others: courtship and love, with their emotional nakedness; the simple moments of family life; the appalling rawness of

In any government, interests precede truth.

In a well-functioning democracy, the state constitution is considered more important than God's holy book, whichever holy book that may be, and God matters only in your private life.

You govern people, you do good and bad things.If you don't have guts to do bad, then step aside.

The fact that, in the United States, there are people serving ten-year prison terms for growing marijuana plants in their backyards while Wall Street racketeers, who have defrauded millions of people and destroyed the global economy, walk free is a kind of bizarre hypocrisy that boggles my mind.

To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when

When I was ten years old, one of my friends brought a Shaleenian kangaroo-cat to school one day. I remember the way it hopped around with quick, nervous leaps, peering at everything with its large, almost circular golden eyes. One of the girls asked if it was a boy cat or a girl cat. Our instructor didn't know; neither did the boy who had brought it; but the teacher made the mistake of asking, 'How can we find out?' Someone piped up, 'We can vote on it!' The rest of the class chimed in with inst

Intellectual property, more than ever, is a line drawn around information, which asserts that despite having been set loose in the world - and having, inevitably, been created out of an individual's relationship with the world - that information retains some connection with its author that allows that person some control over how it is replicated and used.In other words, the claim that lies beneath the notion of intellectual property is similar or identical to the one that underpins notions of p

Selfishness and greed, individual or national, cause most of our troubles.

[The wives of powerful noblemen] must be highly knowledgeable about government, and wise – in fact, far wiser than most other such women in power. The knowledge of a baroness must be so comprehensive that she can understand everything. Of her a philosopher might have said: "No one is wise who does not know some part of everything." Moreover, she must have the courage of a man. This means that she should not be brought up overmuch among women nor should she be indulged in extensive and feminine p

To do things right, we need to UNITE black and white, red and blue, blue and white - all stars and stripes. We need to either apply all the lessons from the past - or get rid of all the stories and START AGAIN. We are moving towards a rainbow world. Our children are intermixing and so are our colors. You can keep your religions and traditions, but always stand with what is good for the greater good of ALL as a united neighborhood instead of a segregated team. This is what America needs. This is

The greatness of God's government knows no end.

Were the judgments of mankind correct, custom would be regulated by the good. But it is often far otherwise in point of fact; for, whatever the many are seen to do, forthwith obtains the force of custom. But human affairs have scarcely ever been so happily constituted as that the better course pleased the greater number. Hence the private vices of the multitude have generally resulted in public error, or rather that common consent in vice which these worthy men would have to be law.

There are times when wisdom cannot be found in the chambers of parliament or the halls of academia but at the unpretentious setting of the kitchen table.

In my opinion, our health care system has failed when a doctor fails to treat an illness that is treatable.

Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of production and trade...

Atheism leaves a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to reputation; all which may be guides to an outward moral virtue, though religion were not; but superstition dismounts all these, and erecteth an absolute monarchy in the minds of men. Therefore atheism did never perturb states; for it makes men wary of themselves, as looking no further: and we see the times inclined to atheism (as the time of Augustus Cæsar) were civil times. But superstition hath been the confusion of ma

And yet we have what purports, or professes, or is claimed, to be a contract—the Constitution—made eighty years ago, by men who are now all dead, and who never had any power to bind us, but which (it is claimed) has nevertheless bound three generations of men, consisting of many millions, and which (it is claimed) will be binding upon all the millions that are to come; but which nobody ever signed, sealed, delivered, witnessed, or acknowledged; and which few persons, compared with the whole numb

We do need a system, and we do need you and your 'Bertos, and sometimes we need Sam to just come along and kick some ass. - Quinn

Everything not forbidden is compulsory

No man's life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session.

F.O.I. protects the guilty, but not the innocent!

Identifying the flaw in the US philosophical roots requires that we move beyond the intellectual and emotional climate in which the Constitution was conceived and adopted. The meanings of concepts and words change with use, and even the Supreme Court has admitted that the original perspective of the American social contract has been altered by the passage of time.

Economic power is exercised by means of a positive, by offering men a reward, an incentive, a payment, a value; political power is exercised by means of a negative, by the threat of punishment, injury, imprisonment, destruction. The businessman's tool is values; the bureaucrat's tool is fear.

It’s not the drug that causes the junkie it’s the laws that causes the junkie because of course the drug laws means that he can’t go and get help because he is afraid of being arrested. He also can’t have a normal life because the war on drugs has made drugs so expensive and has made drug contracts unenforceable which means they can only be enforced through criminal violence. It becomes so profitable to sell drugs to addicts that the drug dealers have every incentive to get people addicted by of