Quotes About Government

granted him a broad and unspecified authority. In his sunny way, Creel would take that authority and run with it, going to extremes that must be described as alarming. In 1917, the United States remained intensely divided over

If we believe in liberty, it must be freedom from both private and public coercion.

The new Constitution eliminates the ignorant Negro vote and places the control of our government where God Almighty intended it should be—with the Anglo-Saxon race," said the president of Alabama's constitutional convention. Among the tools of suppression were tests that asked

More than twelve hundred wheat farmers in No Man's Land signed up for contracts and in turn got a total of $642,637—an average of $498 a farmer. Thus was born a subsidy system that grew into one of the untouchable pillars of the federal budget.

Though he was still reticent about encouraging a massive exodus, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 7028, granting federal authorities the power to buy back much of what it had given away in homesteads over the previous seventy-three years. The executive order was a stunning reversal of everything the government had done with the public domain since the founding of the republic.

In the summer of 1935, FDR launched the Second Hundred Days, one of the great thrusts of domestic change ever seen—zero to sixty in an eyeblink, by government time. Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act to ensure that the pensionless elderly would not starve, started the Works Progress Administration to keep the government payroll rolling, and backed the National Labor Relations Act, which enshrined union rights in the workplace. The

The [Apache] tribe was under siege by government agents, who had jailed some of the medicine men for practicing their rituals. Freedom of religion was cherished as a sacrosanct American right -- everywhere, that is, but on the archipelago of Indian life.

We are the law itself—the same boast would be heard in Indiana

In a democracy it is ultimately for us, the citizens, to judge where to place the balance between security and privacy, safety and liberty. It's our lives and liberties that are threatened, not only by terrorism but also by massive depredations of our privacy in the name of counter-terrorism. If those companies from which governments actually take most of our intimate details want to show that they are still on the side of the angels, they had better join this struggle for transparency too.

I personally believe that there's going to be a good case for the government preserving some type of guarantee to make sure that people have the ability to borrow to finance a house even in a very damaging recession. I think there's going to be a good case for that.

I had someone call me this morning telling me they had somebody who would only work a certain number of hours a week because if they worked too many hours a week then they couldn't get their government assistance. And that person has multiple cell phones, and gets them new every month with new minutes.

So you don't think the government is responsible for anything?" "Oh, it's responsible," Rafferty says. "It's responsible for the sloppiness and imprecision of the War on Terror, for example. It's responsible for taking people's tax dollars and spending the country into debt on useless wars and pointless pork projects to buy votes. It's responsible for bailing out the banks instead of standing up for the people the banks cheated. It's responsible for plenty,

We must safely secure our border by investing in more law enforcement and technology, and receiving cooperation from the Mexican government.

But what if what the working class—white, black, Hispanic, etc.— needs most isn't a check from the government but inclusion in community? And what if the most accessible form of community—the church—is under constant assault by both culture and the government? And finally, what if the elites frowning upon the deplorable poor won't include them in their community, citing their deplorability?

In retrospect, these events are discouraging: too many scientists seem to have been in the service of money and power. Too many in the media saw it as their duty to be "neutral" by uncritically reporting every theory, rather than investigating who sponsored them and whether they were backed by solid evidence. Too many government officials seem to have been willing to sacrifice poor fisherfolk on the altar of high growth.

If political leaders choose which rights to give citizens, then there must be a caste of leaders who enjoy greater freedom than do the citizens who are the recipients of these "rights." That is, the rulers must stand on a higher plane from which they can hand down judgments about what rights are to be given to or withheld from the people below.

to presume that some people are fundamentally entitled to decide how much freedom others should enjoy. What Would It Mean if the State Did Create Freedom? The danger of confusing the state's protection of prepolitical rights on one hand, with its creation of rights/privileges on the other, becomes clear when we ask whether the state creates, say, a woman's right not to be raped.

I love this idea of the states being this laboratory of democracy where we try things out in one state, and if it works, we take it someplace else…But if you're going to do that, you actually have to take what those successful states did. Not just a piece of it. All the hard parts. (from The Economist article "The reading wars" 6/12/2021)

A common American error is to believe that freedom is the absence of state authority.

Do not obey in advance. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.

The ideal capitalism envisioned by advocates of the free market depends upon social virtues and wise policies that it does not itself generate.

Professions can create forms of ethical conversation that are impossible between a lonely individual and a distant government. If members of professions think of themselves as groups with common interests, with norms and rules that oblige them at all times, then they can gain confidence and indeed a certain kind of power. Professional ethics must guide us precisely when we are told that the situation is exceptional. Then there is no such thing as "just following orders.

The word freedom is hypocritical when spoken by the people who create the conditions that leave us sick and powerless. If our federal government and our commercial medicine make us unhealthy, they are making us unfree.

the democracies that arose after the First World War (and the Second) often collapsed when a single party seized power in some combination of an election and a coup d'état. A