Quotes About Government

My colleague and I are journalists. ... Not of the muckraking variety, I hasten to assure you! Corruption is a necessary and time-honored concomitant of any functioning government, which we support wholeheartedly.

The Trump White House stood less for government and the push-pull of competing interests and developing policies, and more, in a brand-savvy world, as a fixed and unpopular cultural symbol.

Steve Bannon was running the Steve Bannon White House, Jared Kushner was running the Michael Bloomberg White House, and Reince Priebus was running the Paul Ryan White House.

military figures like James Mattis, H. R. McMaster, and John Kelly: they found themselves working in an administration that was in every way inimical to basic command principles.

I can't say, 'I want to put a Protestant on the Court for better representation.' No, you can't say that. But I should be able to. You should be able to have the main religion in this country represented on the Supreme Court.

The president, on the verge of starting a war with the FBI, the DOJ, and many in Congress, was going rogue.

what if it was precisely the absence of intent and, instead, the swings of irrationality and mania that managed, even as his government collapsed, to hold so many people in thrall?

David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest.

Confused to find that the power of the presidency had limitations, he came to see the limitations as his own

On March 27, the Office of American Innovation was created and Kushner was put in charge. Its stated mission was to reduce federal bureaucracy—that is, to reduce it by creating more of it, a committee to end committees.

people might conclude that this was just more proof that you obviously couldn't hold Trump responsible for executing on anything, much less an attack on the U.S. Capitol.)

The White House, realized former naval officer Steve Bannon after a few weeks, was really a military base, a government-issue office with a mansion's façade and a few ceremonial rooms sitting on top of a secure installation under military command.

president might have been involved usually became

Nobody had a political background. Nobody had a policy background. Nobody had a legislative background.

The contrast between the two men, Comey and Trump, was in essence the contrast between good government and Trump himself. Comey came across as precise, compartmentalized, scrupulous in his presentation of the details of what transpired and the nature of his responsibility—he was as by-the-book as it gets. Trump, in the portrait offered by Comey, was shady, shoot-from-the-hip, heedless or even unaware of the rules, deceptive, and in it for himself.

few in the thin ranks of Trump's inner circle, with their overnight responsibility for assembling a government, had almost any relevant experience. Nobody had a political background. Nobody had a policy background. Nobody had a legislative background.

Anyone studying the position would conclude that a stronger chief of staff is better than a weaker one, and a chief of staff with a history in Washington and the federal government is better than an outsider.

Government cannot make man richer, but it can make him poorer." —Ludwig Von Mises

They can stop their government any time they wish, simply through brute force or civil disobedience. No tyrant ever rules without the consent of the ruled. They are guilty by their inaction. "And

Government cannot make man richer, but it can make him poorer." —Ludwig Von Mises

The greatest enemy of the US government is the truth.

There is not much less vexation in the government of a private family than in the managing of an entire state.

I am further of opinion that it would be better for us to have [no laws] at all than to have them in so prodigious numbers as we have.

from the bureaucratic point of view, a good citizen is a dead citizen.