Quotes About Government

government with the power to forbid birth control or abortion could also enforce one or the other—but

A story once went the rounds of Israel to the effect that Ben-Gurion described me as 'the only man' in his cabinet. What amused me about is that he (or whoever invented the story) thought that this was the greatest compliment that could be paid to a woman. I very much doubt that any man would have been flattered if I had said about him that he was the only woman in the government!

The Soviet government is the most realistic regime in the world — no ideals.

So long as we have more politicians than statesmen, we shall have problems.

Acts of government are not choices between good and bad. They are between two evils – the lesser of two evils. Someone is always going to get hurt by a decision of government . . . absolute morality, absolute ethics just does not exist in affairs of the state.'99

Other nations merely change governments as a lady changes dancing partners: Canada contrives to fall in a dead faint every time the music stops.

then head of ING Bank in Shanghai, said it all: "The bad news is that the Big Four are insolvent; the good news is that they're sovereign." Technically, no state-owned commercial bank in China enjoys sovereign backing. In practice, however, the Big Four, as weak as they are, are as solid as China itself. As long as the government stands

Crime wouldn't pay if the government ran it. —UNKNOWN

the central government views itself, not competition, as the regulator of industry.

the people will show that they have what Chinese military thinker Sun-tzu called "the supreme skill"; that is, to be able to win without fighting. It happened in Berlin and Bucharest and will soon occur in Beijing: the people will take back their government.

in the words of jurist John Marshall of the U.S. Supreme Court, "the power to tax involves the power to destroy.

China will make real progress in the fight against corruption only when prosecution and conviction are separated from politics.

Americans became so thoroughly democratic that much of the period's political activity, beginning with the Constitution, was diverted to finding means and devices to tame that democracy.

Hamilton used the sinking fund to maintain the confidence of creditors in the government's securities; he had no intention of paying off the outstanding principal of the debt. Retiring the debt would only destroy its usefulness as money and as a means of attaching investors to the federal government.

Nevertheless, some Southerners like James Monroe still had serious reservations about the compromise, believing that assumption would reduce "the necessity for State taxation" and thus would "undoubtedly leave the national government more at liberty to exercise its powers and increase the subjects on which it will act.

173 despots would surely be as oppressive as one," wrote Jefferson in 1785 in his Notes on the State of Virginia. "An elective despotism was not the government we fought for."31

There is something wrong in a government where they who do the most have the least. There is something wrong, when honesty wears a rag, and rascality a robe; when the loving, the tender, eat a crust, while the infamous sit at banquets.

The adventure in popular government has gone on in this country for 150 years. And attended by the new risks of this revolutionary era, it is still the greatest adventure in the world today. And still worth one's faith, and one's courage, and one's perspicacity.

It might be more worthwhile if we stopped wringing our hands and started ringing our congressmen.

Democracy is a government where you can say what you think even if you don't think.

But when there is a lack of honor in government, the morals of the whole people are poisoned.

Confucius perspired out more knowledge than the U.S. Senate has vocalized out in the last 50 years.

The Ways and Means Committee is supposed to find ways to divide up the means.

History in general only informs us what bad government is.