Quotes About Government

Dead people rot on the streets of New Orleans for a week and a half so the feds can sign a private contract.

Terrorism is not an expression of rage. Terrorism is a political weapon. Remove a government's facade of infallibility, and you remove its people's faith.

The self-correcting nature of the market led Smith to think that we could trust the market to provide what was needed – and the principal obstacle to the market trading freely and fulfilling our needs was government intervention.

The invisible hand follows profit, and works less well at providing for needs where the route to making money is less obvious. Aware of this limitation, Smith believed that the state should pay for things like public education to stop people from becoming too stupid.

America must be in really bad shape if you elected me president. You better get it together and find some other qualified people to run this country or we'll all be in big trouble.

I do have a political agenda. It's to have as few regulations as possible.

We have to do more than just elect a new President if we truly want to change this country.

Journalists should denounce government by public opinion polls.

Orwell understood that a government that is beyond the reach of accountability has little incentive to tell the truth. Indeed, its power may arise from the obliteration of objective facts. In the world of 1984, contradictory statements lose all sense of context and we are left with preposterous slogans: "War Is Peace. Freedom Is Slavery. Ignorance Is Strength." And yet Orwell asks us, if there is no one with the power to call out a lie as a lie, does it end up ceasing to be a lie?

The pendulum of our great nation seems to have swung toward conceit and unsteadiness once again, but it is in our power to wrest it back. Our government is there to serve us, not the other way around.

We do not need a heavy hand, just wise policies and an understanding that some things are so big or risky that only the government can be the catalyst for action.

In 1984, Orwell could only imagine a tyrannical central government having the power to systematically undermine objective truth. Today we see that process happening organically through millions of social media "shares.

As John Adams wrote, a republic "is a government of laws, and not of men." A government of laws is a government of reason and a government of books. That was true of our founding and we must ensure it remains a hallmark of our future.

The idea that we all had to go without, that we were all asked to sacrifice in even small ways, created a sense of togetherness. It was everyone's war, and everyone was encouraged to participate. The government sponsored drives to collect spare aluminum, rubber, and the like.

A los ciudadanos globales les preocupa que si cada gobierno persigue su propio y limitado interés, los intereses del patrimonio global se verán perjudicados. Sin duda, esto es un motivo de preocupación cuando se trata de asuntos que afectan realmente al bien común, como el cambio climático o las pandemias.

La eurozona fue un experimento sin precedentes. Sus miembros trataron de construir un mercado único y unificado —de bienes, servicios y dinero— mientras la autoridad política seguía residiendo en las unidades nacionales que la formaban. Habría un mercado único, pero muchos sistemas de gobierno.

If the super-rich believe that they are no longer part of society and have little need of government, it is not because this belief corresponds to objective reality.

What is a nation? A body of associates living under one common law and represented by the same legislature.

In sum, economists (and those who listened to them) became overconfident in their preferred models of the moment: markets are efficient, financial innovation improves the risk-return trade-off, self-regulation works best, and government intervention is ineffective and harmful. They forgot about the other models. There was too much Fama, too little Shiller. The economics of the profession may have been fine, but evidently there was trouble with its psychology and sociology.

Frankly, Victorians don't take orders from Greg Hunt, the bloke who forgot to place an order for vaccines. Seriously. "We're out there doing the commonwealth government's work for them; the least they can do is not be lecturing us on how to get that job done."

He is not a leader, he is just a Liberal (on Josh Frydenberg)

I was struck, in fact, by President Johnson's reaction to these revelations as "close to treason," because it reflected to me this sense that what was damaging to the reputation of a particular administration, a particular individual, was in effect treason, which is very close to saying "I am the state." And I think that quite sincerely many Presidents, not only Lyndon Johnson, have come to feel that.

files in the McNamara study offices, I had discovered that this assumption was mistaken. Every one of these crucial decisions was secretly associated with realistic internal pessimism, deliberately concealed from the public, just as in 1964–65.

don't think it occurred to me in 1961 that the White House might be lying about what the president had been told.