Quotes About Government

They both knew better. It was something to be ashamed of. Americans weren't supposed to take handouts from the government. They were supposed to work hard and succeed on their own.

France has surrendered, Isabelle. Certainly this fact has not escape you. Didn't you hear General de Gaulle? He said ... And who is this General de Gaulle? Why should we listen to him? Marechal Petain is a war hero and our leader. We have to trust our government. Are you joking, Vianne? The government in Vichy is collaborating with Hitler. How can you not understand this danger? Petain is wrong. Does one follow a leader blindly?

And they were ashamed to need anything from the government. From anyone, really. Like her, they'd always worked for what they needed, not relied on the government for a handout.

I guess our government believes children can raise themselves.

En soutenant le régime parlementaire, la bourgeoisie a cherché tout bonnement à opposer une digue à la royauté, sans donner de liberté au peuple.

People's incomes over a certain level aren't taxed to pay for Social Security at all.

Asked in a class in the late 1970s at Harvard Business School about a hypothetical CEO who discovers his product could kill customers, young Jeff Skilling said he "would keep making and selling the product. My job as a businessman is to be a profit center and to maximize return to the shareholders. It's the government's job to step in if a product is dangerous.

The Republican position is now to oppose even studying climate change as well as any and all proposals to reduce carbon emissions. Rational people may disagree about how governments might minimize or prepare for the effects of global warming. You are entitled to your own opinion. But refusing to accept its reality is a new and unacceptable posture. You are not entitled to your own facts.

age twenty-nine the Taxpayer Protection Pledge, which in 1986 made the Republicans' antitax fixation official.

Norquist is known for his jokey line about his wish to make the federal government smaller—"to shrink it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.

It's correct to say that the financial meltdown of 2008 resulted from too much deregulation, too many arcane Wall Street innovations, and some fraud. But that's just one way of explaining it, the one that comfortingly focuses all blame on government and a small class of the rich and powerful and deceitful. The deeper causes were more widespread and unconscious, the fantastical wishfulness affecting at least a large minority of Americans, maybe a majority.

In 1971 about 175 big companies had full-time lobbyists—that is, "public affairs offices"—in Washington. By 1978 five hundred did, and just four years later, in the second Reagan year, nearly 2,500 corporations employed Washington lobbyists.

Once a large majority of Americans came to believe that the federal government was uninspiring or incompetent or corrupt or evil, as they rapidly had over the previous decade, it was going to be a lot easier for the economic right to persuade people that regulating big business and taxing the rich were just plain wrong.

The federal minimum wage is frozen for the entire decade, longer than ever, which translates to an effective pay cut of one-third for America's lowest-paid workers.

Noch nie hat die Demokratie so prompt reagiert, wie wenn es sich darum handelt, etwas gegen die Diktatur nicht zu tun.

CAPITOL COMPLEX WASHINGTON, DC USA

The most terrifying thing about writing this book was how little I had to make up. Between actual historical power outages, government assessments of power grid vulnerabilities, and official estimates of the casualties that a long-term outage would generate, much of the book wrote itself. Having said that, things like the details of how attacks would best be carried out and specific locations of critical infrastructure have been purposely obscured or fictionalized.

THE WHITE HOUSE WASHINGTON, DC USA

MITCH Rapp gave a quick knock on the Oval Office door and then entered.

the chairman of the Joint Chiefs; and a wild card he hadn't seen in years—TJ Burton, the head of FEMA.

I'm afraid optics are all that's left inside the Beltway

America? It was being taken over by corrupt politicians, a mainstream media bent on whipping up divisions, and an Internet full of crazies.

The purpose of the Bill of Rights was to limit what the federal government could do. Any interpretation of a provision of the Bill of Rights as a grant of federal power is ipso facto wrong.

The CIA also maintains countless paramilitary and pseudobusiness organizations that weave in and out of legitimacy and do business much as their civilian counterparts would.