Quotes About Government

With Richard Splett, he's like the only character on 'Veep' that has no angle. He's guileless. He also believes in the power of government.

I know that for most people, seeing is believing when it comes to government efficiency.

Autocracy is a government of the few from above; Bolshevism is a government of the few from below.

Thoreau's declaration in "Civil Disobedience": "I heartily accept the motto—'That government is best which governs least.

how the powers of government were being improperly used through improper warrants of arrest—how it was unconstitutional to stop a person on the freeway and arrest them.

Fundamentalists call defrauding the government "bleeding the beast" and regard it as a virtuous act.

Despite the fact that Uncle Rulon and his followers regard the governments of Arizona, Utah, and the United States as Satanic forces out to destroy the UEP, their polygamous community receives more than $6 million a year in public funds.

It did not speak well of the power of God, in other words, if He needed a human government to prop him up.

I believe after a series of years that no government that has the power to collect taxes and declare war, can be restrained but by a display of sufficient power to break it up," Pickens said.

Madison described the state of play well in May 1798: "The management of foreign relations appears to be the most susceptible of abuse of all the trusts committed to a Government, because they can be concealed or disclosed, or disclosed in such parts and at such times as will best suit particular views.…22 Perhaps it is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to provisions against danger real or pretended from abroad." Extreme measures

My belief was that it was not only his right but his duty to do anything that the needs of the Nation demanded unless such action was forbidden by the Constitution or by the laws.

appreciate the value of our free institutions." In these pursuits Lincoln was committed to what Theodore Parker defined as the "American Idea," which was a "composite idea…of three simple ones: 1. Each man is endowed with certain unalienable rights. 2. In respect of these rights all men are equal. 3. A government is to protect each man in the entire and actual enjoyment of all the unalienable rights….

all those who conduct themselves worthy members of the community are equally entitled to the protection of civil government.

A politician's task was to bring reality and policy into the greatest possible accord with the ideal and the principled.

John Adams had foreseen how central the president would be in American life. "His person, countenance, character, and actions, are made the daily contemplation and conversation of the whole people," Adams wrote in 1790.

In these pursuits Lincoln was committed to what Theodore Parker defined as the "American Idea," which was a "composite idea…of three simple ones: 1. Each man is endowed with certain unalienable rights. 2. In respect of these rights all men are equal. 3. A government is to protect each man in the entire and actual enjoyment of all the unalienable rights….The idea demands…a democracy—a government of all, for all, and by all.

Liberty itself, meanwhile, was dependent on the moral disposition of the populace. "Machiavelli, discoursing on these matters," Algernon Sidney, the seventeenth-century English theorist and politician, wrote, "finds virtue to be so essentially necessary to the establishment and preservation of Liberty, that he thinks it impossible for a corrupted People to set up a good Government, or for a Tyranny to be introduced if they be virtuous.

House. "There are few things wholly evil, or wholly good. Almost everything, especially of governmental policy, is an inseparable compound of the two; so that our best judgment of the preponderance between them is continually demanded." That, Lincoln understood, was the moral work of politics: to make the good outweigh the bad.

So ran the line from the polemics of Edward Alfred Pollard to the politics of George Corley Wallace—a line connecting the Civil War to the Cold War, the 1860s to the 1960s, a distant America to the contemporary one. The federal government was the villain. States' rights were the salvation of the Founders' vision. White supremacy was to be protected

Sometimes I am afraid to go to sleep for fear that I will wake up and our democracy will be gone and never return.

when the laws undertake to add to these natural and just advantages artificial distinctions, to grant titles, gratuities, and exclusive privileges, to make the rich richer and the potent more powerful, the humble members of society—the farmers, mechanics, and laborers—who have neither the time nor the means of securing like favors to themselves, have a right to complain of the injustice of their Government.

It will then have been proved that, among free men, there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet; and that they who take such appeal are sure to lose their case, and pay the cost.

No government can be maintained without the principle of fear as well as duty.

the people are intelligent, the people are just, and in time these characteristics must have an effect on their Representatives.