Quotes About Policy

Among the most urgent political priorities of our age is the separation of economy and state.

In a day and age of global competition and instantaneous financial flows, you have to be highly sensitive to the way in which tax policy impacts your overall competitiveness as a country.

Because the Chinese insistence on one child, I think the proportion of older, non-working age population is going to rise sharply in China.

I don't understand the Democrats' approach to Social Security in this country, and I'm not alone.

Our governments have only occasionally recognized the need of land and people to be protected against economic violence. It is true that economic violence is not always as swift, and is rarely as bloody, as the violence of war, but it can be devastating nonetheless.

There is no good reason for the government to treat homosexuals as a special category of persons.

As a general rule, political talk appears to me to be of all talk the most dreary and the most profitless.

But even democracy ruins itself by excess—of democracy. Its basic principle is the equal right of all to hold office and determine public policy. This is at first glance a delightful arrangement; it becomes disastrous because the people are not properly equipped by education to select the best rulers and the wisest courses (588). "As to the people they have no understanding, and only repeat what their rulers are pleased to tell them" (

Self Government by extravagance and incompetence brings its own end.

One] of the fundamental principles of statesmanship: to persuade radicals that change must be gradual in order to be permanent, and to persuade conservatives that change must be.

The first principle of his policy was that the various peoples of his empire should be left free in their religious worship and beliefs, for he fully understood the first principle of statesmanship—that religion is stronger than the state.

From whatever angle we approach our eternal political problem we monotonously reach the same conclusion: that the community should determine the ends to be pursued, but that only experts should select and apply the means; that choice should be democratically spread, but that office should be rigidly reserved for the equipped and winnowed best. (p.89/543)

From whatever angle we approach our eternal political problem we monotonously reach the same conclusion: that the community should determine the ends to be pursued, but that only experts should select and apply the means; that choice should be democratically spread, but that office should be rigidly reserved for the equipped and winnowed best. (Chapter on Aristotle p.89/543)

even a tax on the tax-collecting farmers general.

Government and History

Here is my first principle of foreign policy: good government at home.

Government was founded on the working premiss of being primarily an asylum for ineptitude and indigence.

The justices were not appointed to roam at large in the realm of public policy and strike down laws that offend their own ideas of what is desirable and what is undesirable.

majority in the Reichstag for any policy—of the Left, the Center or the Right—and that merely to carry on the business of government and do something about the economic paralysis he had to resort to Article 48 of the constitution, which permitted him in an emergency, if the President approved, to govern by decree.

Soviet foreign policy turns out to be as "imperialist" as that of the czars. The Kremlin has betrayed the revolution.

The U.S. national debt is $27 trillion.

Thinking, Fast and Slow, mentioned above, and Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational. One of the handful of books that provides advice on making decisions better is Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, which was written for "choice architects" in business and government who construct decision systems such as retirement plans or organ-donation policies. It has been used to improve government policies in the United States, Great Britain, and other countries.

The biggest problem with gun-free zones is that they aren't free of guns. They are the places of choice for killers and terrorists to rack up their totals of killed and wounded in places like Columbine, Virginia Tech, Fort Hood, and the Charleston AME Church. They are killing zones.

A gun-free zone is not even a consideration; all it does is it restricts law-abiding citizens. It doesn't do a darn thing for the criminal element.