Quotes About Policy

Never did a state . . . enrich itself by the confiscations of the citizens. . . . Every honest mind, every true lover of liberty and humanity must rejoice to find that injustice is not always good policy, nor rapine the high road to riches.

More than any other previous occupant of the White House, Roosevelt understood that the way to manipulate reporters was to let them imagine they were helping shape policy. A "consultation" here, a confidence shared there, and the scribe was transformed into a pen for hire.

Financial repression returned to the West after 2008. Short-term rates in the United States and Europe were held below the level of inflation and remained negative in real terms for years on end.

The narrow policy of preserving, without any foreign mixture, the pure blood of the ancient citizens, had checked the fortune, and hastened the ruin, of Athens and Sparta. The aspiring genius of Rome sacrificed vanity to ambition, and deemed it more prudent, as well as honorable, to adopt virtue and merit for her own wheresoever they were found, among slaves or strangers, enemies or barbarians.

Yet his dexterous policy prolonged the advantages of a salutary peace; and a numerous army of Huns and Alani, whom he had attached to his person, was employed in the defence of Gaul.

I'll argue to the death against stupid legislation, but some rules exist for a reason.

By definition, a government has no conscience. Sometimes it has a policy, but nothing more.

I think we need to ask serious questions about how we engage militarily, when we engage militarily, and on what basis we engage militarily. What kind of intelligence do we have to justify a military engagement?

A country which proposes to make use of modern war as an instrument of policy must possess a highly centralized, all-powerful executive, hence the absurdity of talking about the defense of democracy by force of arms. A democracy which makes or effectively prepares for modern scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic.

In my professional work with the Agency, by the late '70s, I had come to question the value of a great deal of what we were doing, in terms of the intelligence agency's impact on American policy.

We had periodic crises in this country when the technical intelligence didn't support the policy. We had the bomber gap, the missile gap.

Each was the inevitable consequence of its predecessor, and all of them stemmed from the initial decision to set the price of bread far below its real price: that is to say, rather than leave things to the natural law of supply and demand.

On top of all that, there's government. What does government have to do with it, you ask? Everything. Government is coach, referee, cheerleader, and fan in the game of housing.

What went all-but-unnoticed in the push for lockdowns was the fact that major public health organizations had for decades rejected them as a potential solution to epidemics.

states assume that anyone with a positive coronavirus test has died from the disease, no matter what their actual cause of death.

Every power vested in a government is in its nature sovereign, and includes by force of the term a right to employ all the means requisite… to the attainment of the ends of such power.

A national debt, if it is not excessive, will be to us a national blessing.

Opinion, whether well or ill founded, is the governing principle of human affairs.

Those which are of most importance, and which seem most to require local knowledge, are commerce, taxation, and the militia.

A good government implies two things: first, fidelity to the object of government, which is the happiness of the people; secondly, a knowledge of the means by which that object can be best attained.

Has it not, on the contrary, invariably been found that momentary passions, and immediate interests, have a more active and imperious control over human conduct than general or remote considerations of policy, utility, or justice?

Has it not, on the contrary, invariably been found that momentary passions, and immediate interest, have a more active and imperious control over human conduct than general or remote considerations of policy, utility or justice?

It may perhaps be said that the power of preventing bad laws includes that of preventing good ones;

I am sure that in Canada the people appreciate this principle, and the general intelligence which prevails over that country is such that I am sure there is no danger of a reactionary policy ever finding a response in the hearts of any considerable number of our people.