Quotes About Government

Without freedom of the press, there can be no representative government.

For monarchy to work, one man must be wise. For democracy to work, a majority of the people must be wise. Which is more likely?

the government establishes an inquiry office as a guide to the city and a complete stranger refuses to use its services, he is to blame if he gets lost.

I propose another explanation: The reason so many Americans have become alienated from government since the poll of 1964 is that government really has become more incompetent and really has become alienated from the public it is supposed to serve. Political cycles and political fashion have nothing to do with it. American government isn't what it used to be.

A variant of the NIT puts it within our power to end poverty, provide for comfortable retirement and medical care for everyone, and—as a bonus that is probably more important than any of the immediate effects—revitalize American civil society.

Government gets involved in whom a business may hire, how much it pays, and the benefits it provides. The government may make it next to impossible to fire someone without risking a lawsuit.

The argument starts by accepting that the American government will continue to spend a huge amount of money on income transfers. It then contends that we should take all of that money and give it back to the American people in cash grants. The

The goal of an end to poverty is so noble that governments have successfully used the end to justify the means. The means have been high taxation of the productive members of society and arrays of bureaucracies that increasingly regulate the lives of us all. 1

The entry of government into social insurance and then into a broader range of social interventions has caused incalculable human suffering. It has not produced a society in which fewer people are dependent than would otherwise have been the case. The welfare state has artificially, needlessly created a large dependent class. At the bottom is the underclass, stripped of dignity and autonomy, producing new generations socialized to their parents' behavior. There

solutions are beyond the reach of the electoral process and legislative process.

When the government intervenes to help, whether in the European welfare state or in America's more diluted version, it not only diminishes our responsibility for the desired outcome, it enfeebles the institutions through which people live satisfying lives.

A free society is most threatened not by uses of government that are obviously bad, but by uses of government that seem obviously good.

The entry of government into social insurance and then into a broader range of social interventions has caused incalculable human suffering. It has not produced a society in which fewer people are dependent than would otherwise have been the case. The welfare state has artificially, needlessly created a large dependent class. At the bottom is the underclass, stripped of dignity and autonomy, producing new generations socialized to their parents' behavior.

there's a lot to like about day-to-day life in the advanced welfare states of western Europe. They are great places to visit. But the view of life that has taken root in those same countries is problematic. It seems to go something like this: The purpose of life is to while away the time between birth and death as pleasantly as possible, and the purpose of government is to make it as easy as possible to while away the time as pleasantly as possible—the Europe Syndrome.

This is yet another product of the immensely stupid notion of privatizing the proper functions of government, which is based on the colossally stupid notion that private industry is more honest and more efficient than the public sector, which is itself based on the transcendentally stupid decision by too many states that it is better to light their balls on fire than raise taxes in order to pay for anything anywhere at any time.

In 1914 the German government asked prominent scientists and artists to sign a declaration refuting the "lies and slanders of the enemy". Hilbert could not determine whether these statements made about Germany were true (a rather political Entscheidung problem), so he refused to sign.

You can expect that out of Federal people and to make it worse this was a Republican gang that cared nothing for the opinion of the good people of Arkansas who are Democrats.

An earlier plan to marry again had collapsed when her fiancé was killed in a motorcycle accident. His name was Don and he had taught oriental methods of self-defense in a martial arts academy. "They called it an accident," she said, "but I think the government had him killed because he knew too much about flying saucers.

Full participation in government and society has been a basic right of the country symbolizing the full citizenship and equal protection of all.

Voters did say 'repeal health care ' they did say 'reduce the size of government.' But not a single one of them from the tea party or anywhere said 'give tax breaks to the wealthiest.'

The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.

Politics is shit; it corrupts everything it touches...

All told, the Fifty-first Congress passed 531 public laws, representing an unprecedented level of legislative accomplishment unequaled until Theodore Roosevelt's second term. After the final adjournment on March 3, the historian and Republican congressman Henry Cabot Lodge wrote, "No Congress in peace time since the first has passed so many great & important measures of lasting value to the people.

Embracing government activism, he asserted that the public benefit fully justified the government "in making expenditures in the direction that no private enterprise could afford to go.