Quotes About Government

The Bill of Rights was written before data-mining, he said. He was awesomely serene, convinced of his rightness. The right to freedom of association is fine, but why shouldn't the cops be allowed to mine your social network to figure out if you're hanging out with gangbangers and terrorists?

This sounds like you're saying that national security is more important than the Constitution.

Otto von Bismarck quipped, Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made.

That's why you never hear politicians talking about 'citizens,' it's all 'taxpayers,' as though the salient fact of your relationship to the state is how much you pay. Like the state was a business and citizenship was a loyalty program that rewarded you for your custom with roads and health care.

These guys are the world's biggest welfare queens, after all—suck up government money in military contracts, use it to issue bonds, get the government to pass laws that make your bonds into safer bets, then go after even bigger and better laws. I'm guessing they never spend a penny if they can get Uncle Sucker to foot the bill.

we're problems to be solved, not citizens. That's why you never hear politicians talking about 'citizens,' it's all 'taxpayers,' as though the salient fact of your relationship to the state is how much you pay.

It's unbelievable today, but there was a time when the government classed crypto as a munition and made it illegal for anyone to export or use it on national security grounds. Get that? We used to have illegal math in this country.

After all, wasn't the system the problem? No matter who we voted for, the government always seemed to win. What was the point of living out my little fantasy of democratic change and Justice when the real action was being fought out in secrecy, with Anonymous envelopes of cash, encrypted Whispers, secret bunkers, and secret deals?

The people have a negative upon all the executive part of the civil government, as well as the legislative, which is a vast priviledge, enjoyed by no other plantation in America, nor by Ireland—no, nor hitherto by England it self.

The Jewish triple tithe—10 percent to priests and Levites, 10 percent for temple festivals, and 3 1/3 percent for the poor25—came on top of the sales taxes, customs, and annual tribute paid to the Roman government, much of which went to fund its vast military machine.

When the Viennese government compiled a Catalogue of Forbidden Books in 1765, so many Austrians used it as a reading guide that the Hapsburg censors were forced to include the Catalogue itself as a forbidden book.

It was often said that he was in the CIA, but [James] Bath denied that to Time. Later, he equivocated. There's all sorts of degrees of civilian participation [in the CIA], he says. It runs the whole spectrum, maybe passing on relevant data to more substantive things. The people who are called on by their government and serve- I don't think your're going to find them talking about it.

Oh my God, Hillary, if a Republican is elected, I'm screwed because all they want to do is take away Obamacare.

y entró en esa buena sociedad de gente del gobierno que no está a la cabeza, pero que son, o pudieran ser, el verdadero poder oculto de la nación: gente que sabe de qué habla, o habla como si lo supiera.

Who are the aristocrats now — who are chosen as the best to rule? Those who have money and the brains for money. It doesn't matter what else they have: but they must have money-brains — because they are ruling in the name of money." "The people elect the government," he said. "I know they do. But what are the people? Each one of them is a money-interest.

I have heard, in such a way as to believe it, of your recently saying that both the army and the Government needed a dictator. Of course, it was not for this, but in spite of it, that I have given you command. Only those generals who gain successes can set up as dictators. What I now ask of you is military success and I will risk the dictatorship.

We say easily, for instance, 'The ignorant ought not to vote.' We would say, 'No civilized state should have citizens too ignorant to participate in government,' and this statement is but a step to the fact: that no state is civilized which has citizens too ignorant to help rule it.

IX. THE PRICE OF DISASTER The price of the disaster of slavery and civil war was the necessity of quickly assimilating into American democracy a mass of ignorant laborers in whose hands alone for the moment lay the power of preserving the ideals of popular government; of overthrowing a slave economy and establishing upon it an industry primarily for the profit of the workers. It was this price which in the end America refused to pay and today suffers for that refusal.

It is fair to say that the Negro carpetbag governments established the public schools of the south. Although recent researches have shown many germs of a public school system in the south before the war, there can be no reasonable doubt that common school instruction in the south, in the modern sense of the term, was founded by the Freedmen's Bureau and missionary societies, and that the state public school system was formed mainly by Negro Reconstruction governments.

So flagrant became the political scandals that reputable men began to leave politics alone, and politics consequently became disreputable. Men began to pride themselves on having nothing to do with their own government, and to agree tacitly with those who regarded public office as a private perquisite.

The most obvious question which this study suggest is: How far in a State can a recognized moral wrong safely be compromised?

Meantime, new thoughts came to the nation: the inevitable period of moral retrogression and political trickery that ever follows in the wake of war overtook us. So flagrant became the political scandals that reputable men began to leave politics alone, and politics consequently became disreputable. Men began to pride themselves on having nothing to do with their own government, and to agree tacitly with those who regarded public office as a private perquisite.

In a republic people precede their government. Throughout the war the people demanded more stringent and more energetic measures than the administration was prepared to adopt. They called for emancipation before it was proclaimed;for a Freedman's Bureau before it was organized; for a Civil Rights bill before it was passed, and for impartial sufferage before it was finally, by act of Congress, secured.

A writer worth his salt is probably better off in an adversarial relation with the U.S. Senate.