Quotes About Government

The theme of previous editions of The British Polity has

departments headed by ministers and staffed by civil servants.

he theme of previous editions of The British Polity has been that of continuity

Labour winning 30 of the 60 seats in the assembly

themselves were deemed inadequate to meet Britain's fundamental

turmoil and the legacy of an unpopular war with Iraq; the Conservative opposition looked likely to form the next government; and many of the constitutional reforms were not

For if there is one lesson worth retaining from the travails of the Cold War and the miseries it brought in its wake, it is the folly of seeking simple answers to complicated questions. It is a lesson which governments still show no sign of learning.

The politicians would be blind men arguing over the colors of the rainbow. If the government had subjected its policy "to a randomized controlled trial then we might, by now, have known its true worth and be some way ahead in our thinking," Cochrane observed.

But a democratic government cannot afford to be as crude as that. It never goes in for summary repression or direct control; it nullifies rather than conceals undesirable news; it controls emphasis rather than facts; it balances bad news with good; it lies directly only when it is certain that the lie will not be found out during the course of the war. This was the method

It would be pointless to deny that some crime in Australia is linked to migrant communities. A factor here is that many migrants come from countries where the government trusts none of its citizens to tell the truth and demands proof for everything. The Australian system, where the authorities generally assume that a citizen is telling the truth, but provides penalties if they are then caught lying, tempts some migrants into illegal acts...

When people lost faith in their government, the result was revolution.

The democratic theory is that if you accumulate enough ignorance at the polls, you produce intelligence.

Scientists and inventors of the USA (especially in the so-called "blue state" that voted overwhelmingly against Trump) have to think long and hard whether they want to continue research that will help their government remain the world's superpower. All the scientists who worked in and for Germany in the 1930s lived to regret that they directly helped a sociopath like Hitler harm millions of people. Let us not repeat the same mistakes over and over again.

Since the days of George III, Americans have resisted authority; Canadians, by and large, have not. And it seems to me that if Canadians from time to time have endured too much authority, you Americans have suffered from too little. If government becomes too strong, it becomes arbitrary; if it becomes too weak it can also become corrupt

The worst of all states is the people's state.

Well, why should I sell the Canadian farmers' wheat?

The state has no business in the bedrooms of the nation.

There's no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation.

We take the position that there is no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation.

The presidency is not an office job. If I only sit in the office in Dar es Salaam, I'm not running the country. I visit the country to inspect development programmes, to inspect activities, to see how things are going, how the government agenda is being implemented, what are the teething issues.

Some government expenditure actually makes a profit. Our theatre leads the world. Loads of tourists must be attracted by the fact that you could spend a week in London doing nothing but visit superb museums and galleries, free.

Visit USA.gov and you'll find thousands of directorates, agencies, boards, offices, and services replete with overlapping responsibilities, ancient priorities, and divided accountability.

When I visit local communities, people often complain that they need the approval of several dozen government departments to get something done or to start a business, and people are quite frustrated about this.

My earliest memories are when my father was the attorney general at the height of the Civil Rights Movement. We would go to visit him at the Justice Department and take the tunnel over to the FBI building and watch the sharpshooters at practice.