Quotes About Governance

The nations of the earth that most vigorously foul the planetary nest and those in possession of the most destructive arsenals ought to be governed only by young women with small kids. More than anyone else, such mothers must live in the future, and they also face each day the realities of raw human nature.. This gives them a special insight

The elite gets things wrong, says Douglas Carswell in The End of Politics and the Birth of iDemocracy, 'because they endlessly seek to govern by design a world that is best organized spontaneously from below'. Public policy failures stem from planners' excessive faith in deliberate design. 'They consistently underrate the merits of spontaneous, organic arrangements, and fail to recognize that the best plan is often not to have one.

Every class is unfit to govern.' The problem is not the abuse of power, echoed the motivational speaker Michael Cloud more recently, but the power to abuse. The

Self-actualization, for a man, is self-mastery, the strength to govern his appetites and passions and not be governed by them.

When the safety of a state depends on any man's good faith, and its affairs cannot be administered properly unless its rulers choose to act from good faith, it will be very unstable," Spinoza notes.

La mayoría de las sociedades han sido regidas por los bárbaros y los hechiceros.

The man in Drawing Room B, Car No. 4, was a newspaper publisher who believed that men are evil by nature and unfit for freedom, that their basic interests, if left unchecked, are to lie, to rob and to murder one another—and, therefore, men must be ruled by means of lies, robbery and murder, which must be made the exclusive privilege of the rulers, for the purpose of forcing men to work, teaching them to be moral and keeping them within the bounds of order and justice.

los brutos, particulares o públicos, convencidos de que pueden gobernar a sus mejores por la fuerza, aprenderán la lección de lo que ocurre cuando la fuerza bruta tropieza con la inteligencia y con la fuerza aliadas.

What Washington Needs is Adult Supervision.

In other words, FDR understood that to be effective, governance couldn't be so antiseptic that it set aside the basic stuff of politics: You had to sell your program, reward supporters, punch back against opponents, and amplify the facts that helped your cause while fudging the details that didn't.

a report would surface from the Pentagon or Langley, recommending that U.S. policy pay more attention to human rights and governance issues when dealing with our Middle East partners. But then the Saudis would deliver a vital tip that kept an explosive device from being loaded onto U.S.-bound cargo planes or our naval base in Bahrain would prove critical in managing a flare-up with Iran in the Strait of Hormuz, and those reports would be relegated to the bottom of a drawer.

governance couldn't be so antiseptic that it set aside the basic stuff of politics: You had to sell your program, reward supporters, punch back against opponents, and amplify the facts that helped your cause while fudging the details that didn't.

how are we to tone down the voices of nationalism, or of those in support of profiteering, or religious fanaticism, racial superiority, or cultural exceptionalism? If economic viability trumps human health in systems of governance, and if personal rights trump community obligations at almost every turn, what sort of future can we expect never to see?

But in no way should any of this be taken to mean the Bolsheviks established effective structures of governance. Far from it: the Bolshevik monopoly went hand in hand with administrative as well as societal chaos, which Lenin's extremism exacerbated, causing an ever-deepening crisis, which he cited as justification for his extremism.

The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.

The people who cast votes decide nothing. The people who count votes decide everything.

In a complex world where people can be atypical in an infinite number of ways, there is great value in discovering the baseline. And knowing what happens on average is a good place to start. By so doing, we insulate ourselves from the tendency to build our thinking - our daily decisions, our laws, our governance - on exceptions and anomalies rather than on reality.

Everything in human affairs is connected to everything else, and that is especially true of violence. Across time and space, the more peaceable societies also tend to be richer, healthier, better educated, better governed, more respectful of their women, and more likely to engage in trade

democracy should be understood not as the answer to the question "Who should rule?" (namely, "The People"), but as a solution to the problem of how to dismiss bad leadership without bloodshed.

The recent failure of democracy to take hold in many African and Islamic states is a reminder that a change in the norms surrounding violence has to precede a change in the nuts and bolts of governance.

Populist voters are older, more religious, more rural, less educated, and more likely to be male and members of the ethnic majority. They embrace authoritarian values, place themselves on the right of the political spectrum, and dislike immigration and global and national governance.

Also, a state without an effective police and judiciary had to make a little punishment go a long way.

Democracies commit fewer democides because their form of governance, by definition, is committed to inclusive and nonviolent means of resolving conflicts. More important, the power of a democratic government is restricted by a tangle of institutional restraints, so a leader can't just mobilize armies and militias on a whim to fan out over the country and start killing massive numbers of citizens.

To govern was to serve, not to rule.