Quotes About Government

We know that laws ought to be obeyed only if they come out of people's sense of justice, not because the state needs them to preserve its power. Laws devised for the depravity of power are as worthless as the paper they are printed on.

I think our refusal to read {some} novels exactly corresponds with..our refusal to confront inconvenient facts of a changing world and our moral culpability in what our government has done in our name . . . While more novels are read than ever before--those are escapist novels--so as to forget what we need to remember.

For a country to have a great writer is like having a second government. That is why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.

Our government declared that it is conducting some kind of great reforms. In reality, no real reforms were begun and no one at any point has declared a coherent programme.

A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.

On top of all that, there's government. What does government have to do with it, you ask? Everything. Government is coach, referee, cheerleader, and fan in the game of housing.

During the HIV epidemic, newspapers had questioned public health pronouncements and warned against government overreach. As early as June 1983, the New York Times had published an opinion piece titled "AIDS and Civil Liberties," citing the "danger that the judicial and political systems will fall prey to the irrational demands of a frightened public and impose groundless and onerous regulations that result in the widespread loss of freedom."39

It is better to be here ready to protect the peace than to take blind shelter across the sea, rushing to respond only after freedom is lost. We've learned that isolationism never was and never will be an acceptable response to tyrannical governments with an expansionist intent.

The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed — where the government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees. However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once.

Government is a system of morality developed by philosophers and refined by mercenaries.

Like first love — or heartbreak — the first government you learn to know stays with you.

You don't question the right of the government to kill, to confiscate and imprison. If a private person should be guilty of the things the government is doing all the time, you'd brand him a murderer, thief and scoundrel. But as long as the violence committed is "lawful," you approve of it and submit to it. So it is not really violence that you object to, but to people using violence "unlawfully.

Think it over and see if it is not the law itself, the government which really creates crime by compelling people to live in conditions that make them bad. See how law and government uphold and protect the biggest crime of all, the mother of all crimes, the capitalistic wage system, and then proceeds to punish the poor criminal.

Well, it's a - I don't want to disappoint you, but it's a time worn tradition of Australian Governments over many years not to get into any discussion about that aspect of intelligence matters.

Even to observe neutrality you must have a strong government.

It's not tyranny we desire it's a just, limited, federal government.

I believe the British government forms the best model the world ever produced…. This government has for its object public strength and individual security.

We are now forming a republican government. Real liberty is neither found in despotism or the extremes of democracy, but in moderate governments.

Every power vested in a government is in its nature sovereign, and includes by force of the term a right to employ all the means requisite… to the attainment of the ends of such power.

Why has government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice, without constraint.

Government implies the power of making laws. It is essential to the idea of a law, that it be attended with a sanction; or, in other words, a penalty or punishment for disobedience.

Your people, sir, is nothing but a great beast!

The inquiry constantly is what will please, not what will benefit the people. In such a government there can be nothing but temporary expedient, fickleness, and folly.

If the federal government should overpass the just bounds of its authority and make a tyrannical use of its powers, the people, whose creature it is, must appeal to the standard they have formed, and take such measures to redress the injury done to the Constitution as the exigency may suggest and prudence justify.