Quotes About Government

How the Feds ever acquired the power to decide how much pain a sick person must suffer before dying remains legally obscure. The Constitution certainly never granted such sadistic power to any part of the government.

None of Dr. Leary's most important studies have either suffered refutation or enjoyed confirmation, because enacted law — statutes enacted after and because of Dr. Leary's research — makes it a crime for any other psychologists or psychiatrists to replicate such research. I know you've heard that the Inquisition ended in 1819, but in many areas of psychotherapy and medicine, the U.S. government has taken up where the Vatican left off.

By the 1990s, of course, the U.S. government no longer considered people who showed respect for the Constitution to be suspected Communists. Instead, such people were considered suspected Terrorists.

Confucius (as the barbarians call him) also taught that, "When the government is honest, the people will learn honesty by example; when the government is crooked, the people will learn to be thieves also.

There is no government, no industrial-military complex, no economic system, no mass media that can ever reduce us to puppets and robots as thoroughly as the biological and environmental dictatorships have. — F.M. Esfandiary, Upwingers

Many of our Government officials drop amphetamine pep pills at a fantastic rate, especially those who have to jet around the world for conferences every week. They think they're using it only to keep alert, but many of them really have the habit. The American people should seriously consider the extent to which our entire international policy is shaped by people who are chronic users of a drug known to produce paranoia and irrational hostility.

Nobody up there is a friend of yours; nobody up there wants you to have what you would call freedom. The purpose of "government" is to produce consumers and workers who will keep the cost of labor down, and the profits high for the owners . . .

For this has become so crooked and perverse a nation that your precious bodily fluids are no longer your own, and not even your bladder or bloodstream are private. There is no place where they may not watch.

As Count Bismarck once said, "Laws are like sausages: you have much more respect for them if you haven't actually seen how they're made.

it cannot be the intention of Congress or the Executive Department (defendant) to provide the aged Private Ryans a discriminatory hemlock drink from the cup of life after reaching age sixty-five. If in fact that is the intention, then this government of William Jefferson Clinton is not worth fighting for.

Chee was clearly mystified and impressed at the vagaries of the federal system.

Simply put, there are actions of state that are the right things to do, even if they cannot be defined in terms of conventional morality.

Likewise, democracy in Saudi Arabia is potentially our enemy.

simply because a nation is a democracy does not mean that its foreign policy will necessarily turn out to be better or more enlightened than that of a dictatorship.

Democracy and morality are simply not synonymous

The aftermath of creedal passion is cynical indifference followed by the return of conservatism; creedal passion holds government and society to standards that they simply cannot meet. Nevertheless, Huntington believes, creedal passion is at the core of America's greatness. By holding officials and institutions to impossible standards in a way no other country does, the United States has periodically

Rich kids are more confident that they can influence government, and they are largely right about that.14 Not surprisingly, poor kids are less likely to try.

High-quality national surveys of high school seniors confirm that kids from less educated homes are less knowledgeable about and interested in politics, less likely to trust the government, less likely to vote, and much less likely to be civically engaged in local affairs than their counterparts from college-educated homes.

the more fundamental problem with the big government explanation is that by most measures (all spending, or spending on the welfare state in real per capita terms, or spending as a fraction of GDP; number of government employees) the size of government lagged behind the I-we-I curve by several decades. Federal government spending and the number of employees rose steadily in tandem with the I-we-I curve from 1900 to 1970 and kept rising until they leveled off after the 1980s.

What changes behavior? What is the government's role in bringing hope to its citizens? How do we break the cycle of despair?

I believe that, as long as there is plenty, poverty is evil. Government belongs wherever evil needs an adversary and there are people in distress.

Government isn't about religion or signs or symbols… It's about power and control.

Embassy Row in Washington, D.C., the summer I turned

Kenneth Minogue