Quotes About Government

The predominant view was that budgets should be balanced and money supplies tightened. This, as we know today, only made matters worse.

Does the history of tyranny apply to the United States? Certainly the early Americans who spoke of "eternal vigilance" would have thought so. The

James Madison nicely made the point that tyranny arises "on some favorable emergency.

We believe that we have checks and balances, but have rarely faced a situation like the present: when the less popular of the two parties controls every lever of power at the federal level, as well as the majority of statehouses.

where annual elections end, tyranny begins.

Most governments, most of the time, seek to monopolize violence. If only the government can legitimately use force, and this use is constrained by law, then the forms of politics that we take for granted become possible.

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.

The claim that order is freedom or that freedom is order ends in tyranny.

Beware the one-party state.

Because the American federal government uses mercenaries in warfare and American state governments pay corporations to run prisons, the use of violence in the United States is already highly privatized.

Because the American federal government uses mercenaries in warfare and American state governments pay corporations to run prisons and internment camps, the use of violence in the United States is already highly privatized.

It is the government's job to increase both freedom and security.

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.

WE TEND TO assume that institutions will automatically maintain themselves against even the most direct attacks. This was the very mistake that some German Jews made about Hitler and the Nazis after they had formed a government.

statehood was crucial to future national existence.

The state is for the recognition, endorsement, and protection of rights, which means creating the conditions under which rights can be recognized, endorsed, and protected. The state endures to create a sense of durability. A

We share Hitler's planet and several of his preoccupations; we have changed less than we think. We like our living space, we fantasize about destroying governments, we denigrate science, we dream of catastrophe. if we think that we are the victims of some planetary conspiracy, we edge towards Hitler. If we believe that the Holocaust was a result of the inherent characteristics of Jews, Germans, Poles, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, or anyone else, then we are moving in Hitler's world.

An important sign of the collapse of the rule of law is the rise of a paramilitary and its merger with government power.

Governments and entire planets are important, Threepio. But when you sift everything down, they're all just made of people.

An interim government was set up in Afghanistan. It included two women, one of whom was Minister of Women's Affairs. Man, who'd she have to show here ankles to to get that job?

the key to successful development performance is achieving a careful balance among what government can successfully accomplish, what the private market system can do, and what both can best do when working together.

America has got the equivalent of the stage three cancer of socialism because the federal government is tampering in all kinds of stuff it has no business tampering in.

I oppose any attempt to grant homosexual unions the same legal privileges that civil government affords to traditional marriage and family life.

We don't want the efficiency of the federal government and the compassion of the IRS to run our health care.