Quotes About Government

A constitution is the arrangement of magistracies in a state.

The picture of the free market is necessarily one of harmony and mutual benefit; the picture of State intervention is one of caste conflict, coercion, and exploitation.

I'm not against the government. I'm against this ever-expanding government that doesn't know its limits. And that's how I see the role of the attorney general, as someone in an office that can protect you and defend the Constitution and defend state sovereignty and our individual liberty.

Freedom of the press is not questioned when investigative journalism unearths scandals, But that does not mean that every classified state document should be made available to journalists.

In matters of state, one has to be full of sentiments, but one can never be sentimental.

None but a people advanced to a high state of moral and intellectual excellence are capable in a civilized condition of forming and maintaining free governments, and among those who are so far advanced, very few indeed have had the good fortune to form constitutions capable of endurance.

They have seized upon the government by bribery and corruption. They have made speculation and public robbery a science. They have loaded the nation, the state, the county, and the city with debt.

There's no conflict between the social-welfare state and open markets.

As attorney general, I have a duty to defend the laws and constitution of the State of Missouri.

The debt ceiling at some point has to be raised. I don't think there's anybody that questions the fact that if we ended up getting in a situation where the U.S. government was sending out IOUs like the state of California did at one point, that ends up creating quite a brand problem for our country.

When I'll... form a government, I don't intend to cooperate with those who go against the State of Israel.

It is not for the State Department or even the Secretary of State to say when and how the resources of the American people will be spent.

The State Department desperately needs to be vigorously harnessed. It has too big a role to play in the formulation of foreign policy, and foreign policy is too important to be left up to foreign service officers.

Government shutdowns are so stupid. From my perspective, somebody who's been in government, been in the military, worked with federal government workers in the State Department, in USAID and in the Department of Defense - you're hurting them.

You're not hearing people like Madeleine Albright argue that the budget of the State Department should be as large as the Defense Department. The Pentagon is going to be larger by its nature. It's going to have more people.

Having been raised overseas, I wanted to become a diplomat. But the State Department thought I was too 'liberal' to be happy with that job.

At the State Department, where I oversaw our human rights diplomacy, I often confronted dictatorships like China about their censorship of the Internet, which they justified by claiming they were merely filtering out lies. Our government cannot and should not take that path.

But at the end of the day, I want people to say that I played a major role in restoring people's confidence in the ability of state government to be on their side, to fight for them, and again - I'll say it again - to get things done.

Why should a city be mandated to do something by the federal government or state government without the money to do it?

I think that the press has a duty and an obligation to report on local government, state government, federal government - to be aggressive, to do its job. And its job is to report on whatever it's covering.

We are going to have to make some very difficult choices, because state government cannot continue to spend more than it takes in.

Put simply, no one in state government can create new specially protected classes except the General Assembly with the concurrence of the Governor.

I cannot allow state government to continue to be consumed by this game of political 'gotcha.'

The insurance companies aren't covering that. Should Monsanto be liable for these losses? Should the state government? Who's going to cover the losses? The fact is, here's an industry with no long-term liability in place.