Quotes About Government

You can steal in this country, you can rape and murder, you can bribe public officials, you can pollute the morals of the young, you can burn your place of business down for the insurance money, you can do almost anything you want, and if you act with just a little caution and common sense you'll never even be indicted. But if you don't pay your income tax, Grofield, you will go to jail.

Nonetheless, that know-how is often unmanageable. Avoidable failures are common and persistent, not to mention demoralizing and frustrating, across many fields—from medicine to finance, business to government. And the reason is increasingly evident: the volume and complexity of what we know has exceeded our individual ability to deliver its benefits correctly, safely, or reliably.9

For example, in 2009 the British Government published, online, 700,000 individual documents that related to the expenses of British MPs. In response, the Guardian newspaper built an online platform to host these documents, and asked readers collectively to sift through them, a task too large for one person alone, and flag those that might be of interest, adding analysis if need be. A community of over 20,000 individuals engaged in what was, in effect, a public audit.

Our system provides for a winner to take office on January 20th, and he is expected to take command of the ship of state. Failure to do so, characterized by hesitation and indecision, will harm the national interest.

For example, before World War II, the U.S. government called the department that wages war the "War Department." After the war, they decided to call it the "Defense Department." This change has come about because the government does not want to admit that it starts wars. Rather it wants to manipulate people into thinking that it only defends the country against aggressive others. In short, politically, the word "defense" sells better than the word "war.

The US government has often spread disinformation — for example, to justify sending Marines into Central or South American Countries to depose one government and put a more "friendly" government into power. The fact that these stories will be discredited years later is of no consequence, of course, to the fabricators of such stories. Disinformation often works. The discrediting of it is usually too late to matter. Years later, people don't seem to care.

Congress also refused to give the South subsidies proportional to those that went to the West and Northeast.

In one sense, massive land redistribution was the basis of the American republic. The U.S. government took Indian lands, peaceably through treaties if it could and forcibly or through fraud and war when it thought necessary. The government then redistributed these ceded or conquered lands to white citizens. Southern redistribution, in essence, was about whether Southern whites could be treated as Indians and Southern blacks could be treated like white men.

Sumner asserted that without equality of citizens before the law and full consent of the governed, a government could not be considered republican. It defined a standard that the North no more met than the South.3

You can't trust the government to do anything right-except, of course, to conspire and cover up. Then it becomes diabolically efficient. The very people who are wildest for government conspiracies are often the same people who believe the government is incapable of delivering the mail efficiently.

When whiskey was supposed to be taxed at $2 a gallon and sold for $1.25 a gallon, it did not take advanced math to guess something was amiss.

Liberal" in the nineteenth-century United States and Europe designated people who in many, but not all, respects would be called conservatives in the twenty-first century. They embraced minimal government, a free market economy, individualism, and property rights; they attacked slavery, aristocracy, monarchy, standing armies, the Catholic Church, and hereditary authority.

This was Whiggish free labor dependent on government subsidies, tariffs, and other interventions; it was far from liberal laissez-faire. It created a society that Southern Radical governments sought to emulate, but they lacked the resources and advantages that the federal government bestowed outside the South.

As for loving woman, I have never understood why some people had a fit. I still don't. It seems fine to me. If an individual is productive responsible, and energetic, why should her choice in a partner make such a fuss? The government is only too happy to take my tax money and yet they uphold legislation that keeps me a second class citizen. Surely, there should be a tax break for those of us who are robbed of full and equal participation and protection in the life of our nation.

No government has the right to tell its citizens when or whom to love. The only queer people are those who don't love anybody.

The tax code will never be simplified in our lifetime because it's not about taxes; it's about congressmen distributing the pork.

the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start, a liberal immigration bill, some seventy different education bills—they're all passed during the 1960s by President Lyndon Johnson.

We certainly see how government can work to your detriment today, but people have forgotten what government can do for you. They've forgotten the potential of government, the power of government, to transform people's lives for the better.

Until the end of his life, whenever the subject of the vast growth of the LBJ Company and associated business enterprises was raised, Lyndon Johnson would emphasize that he owned none of it ("All that is owned by Mrs. Johnson.… I don't have any interest in government-regulated industries of any kind and never have had").

Speaking out as he had never before done in Congress, Lyndon Johnson in 1947 opposed most of Truman's "Fair Deal.

We want to make the farmer and his wife and family believe and know that they are no longer the forgotten people, but make them know that they are remembered as part of—yea, they are the bulwark of the Government.

Why political power? Because political power shapes all of our lives. It shapes your life in little ways that you might not even think about.

The belief that "a political system created in a much simpler economic era still affords the people effective control through their votes over the complex industrial state which has come into being" is a popular delusion. "Politicians must perpetuate this idea, for their jobs depend on it," but "a true keynote speech would reveal the political government handling certain administrative details for an immensely powerful ruling class.

The city governments of the United States are the worst in Christiandom - the most expensive, the most inefficient, and the most corrupt.