Quotes About Government

In the bad old seventies, when Mondale was Veep, and the government still worried about things like fuel and noise, the Vice President flew on small, efficient DC-9S.

George Bush knew five times more about the governments of the world—his own included—than Ronald Reagan ever would.

How was power to be shared in a country that in its three-thousand-year history had never once witnessed a peaceful struggle for power?

As we'll see, there was an irony in this. The government's claims were propagandistic exaggerations, which came to be widely disbelieved. But actually the government resisted far more than the Communists, who resisted very little and whose losses were a small fraction of those suffered by the KMT's forces.

Washington offered a republican substitute for the dignity of royalty.

From 1836, down to last year, there is no proof of the Government having any confidence in the duration of peace, or possessing increased security against war.

Marco was an intelligent intelligence officer.

You see, that's the whole point of being in government. If you don't like something you simply make up a law that makes it illegal.

To cut 1930s jobless, FDR taxed corps and rich. Govt used money to hire many millions. Worked then; would now again. Why no debate on that?

The impoverished families of the long-term unemployed strained to the point of dysfunction, communities deprived of viable economies, interrupted educations, lost skills: these and many more results of capitalism's crisis will put difficult demands on governments for years. On the one hand, they will aggravate social problems that impose costs on governments.

Socialism is when the government does stuff. And it's more socialism the more stuff it does. And if it does a real lot of stuff, it's communism.

We mistake politics for legislative debate. You can be passionate without being personal.

Power I defined as personal influence of an effective sort on governmental action.

They will not be identical unless by chance: human prediction about other humans is not good enough. Why that is sometimes hard for readers inexperienced in government to see, I cannot tell (xvi).

missîm. The term missîm in Hebrew refers to a sort of tax, not of money but of physical labor. Citizens owed a month of required work to the government each year.

I kept seeing turning points. First the uprising. Then the creation of the Free Syrian Army, the FSA. Now a big assassination bombing in the heart of Assad's government. But the turn never came. It just got worse and worse.

The sense that just about anything goes with the collection of public revenues and the making of public expenditure has contributed mightily to the current malaise.

Securing, not prohibiting, the orderly transfer of wealth from A to B, based on wealth differentials, is the raison d'être of the [New Deal programs]. The contrast between the modern progressive and classical liberal agendas could not be more explicit.

The real question of government versus private enterprise is argued on too philosophical and abstract a basis. Theoretically, planning may be good. But nobody has ever figured out the cause of government stupidity and until they do (and find the cure) all ideal plans will fall into quicksand.

People come to Washington believing it's the center of power. I know I did. It was only much later that I learned that Washington is a steering wheel that's not connected to the engine.

Washington was well aware that in a representative government, a government of laws not of men, separating the man from the title was essential.

In many contexts defaults have some extra nudging power because consumers may feel, rightly or wrongly, that default options come with an implicit endorsement from the default setter, be it the employer, government, or TV scheduler. For this and other reasons, setting the best possible defaults will be a theme we explore often in the course of this book.

John Rawls (1971) called the publicity principle. In its simplest form, the publicity principle bans government from selecting a policy that it would not be able or willing to defend publicly to its own citizens.

The three social influences that we have emphasized—information, peer pressure, and priming—can easily be enlisted by private and public nudgers. As we will see, both business and governments can use the power of social influence to promote many good (and bad) causes.