Quotes About Government

In the back of my mind, always, is the firmly held belief that public policies must serve the long-term interests and well-being of the community at large.

Are we going to be risk-averse about health care, education, child well-being, or are we going to set aside those attitudes, which we find in government all too often, and lead?

Inside Iran, people are actually quite well-educated about America. There are things they don't understand, particularly in the government, but the people, by and large, know the American sensibility quite well, and the reverse is not true.

The mid-day meal is a well-intentioned scheme and has to be implemented effectively.

There are no adequate substitutes for father, mother, and children bound together in a loving commitment to nurture and protect. No government, no matter how well-intentioned, can take the place of the family in the scheme of things.

Oddly enough, government policy helped get the fast food outlets into the city. Very well-intentioned small business administration loans to encourage minority business ownership. The easiest business to get into is opening a fast-food franchise in the inner city.

Well-intentioned liberalism always leads to progressivism. There's no choice there. Once that action is taken the only thing you can run on is totalitarianism - you have no choice.

The sad thing is, when it comes to diet, is that even when well-intentioned Feds try to do right by us, they fail. Either they're outvoted by puppets of agribusiness, or they are puppets of agribusiness.

Too often, we say that the Left is wrong but well-intentioned. Some are. But most simply want government to control other people's lives, and they believe in Stalinistic methods to achieve that goal.

The American people need to know that money is being used effectively because frankly, the nation can't afford careless spending, no matter how well-intentioned.

I've seen the government up close and personal, and for the most part, it's inefficient and hidebound, and it stifles creativity in any industry it clutches within its well-meaning but slimy tentacles.

The playing field is anything but level when you walk into the grocery store. So much government subsidy goes into processed foods. Even when you're well-meaning as a parent or a shopper for yourself, you can't help but be pulled toward the highly processed food.

It is a very great mistake, and a very common one, even for well-read persons, to adopt the idea that the progress of the human race in the science of government, in the arts of civilization and refinement, and in the establishment of morality and religion, has been constantly and steadily towards improvement and perfection.

We need a government which, yes, guarantees basic standards in public services, but which also steps in to protect people's wellbeing as they take part in our consumer democracy - particularly online.

In abandoning the understanding that things - services, goods, wars, and houses - have costs, we risk becoming infantilised, incapable of making decisions about government or finance, and perhaps above all about the environment, the wellbeing of the planet upon which we depend and which our children will inherit from us.

Let's hope Trump's State Department and USAID will follow open records laws and disclose the details of the Obama-Soros wellspring.

When the Soviet Union fell, optimistic scholars believed the world had shifted inexorably in the direction of free markets and liberal democracy. Instead, the West gradually embraced bigger government and weaker social bonds, creating a fragmented society in which the only thing we all belong to, as President Barack Obama puts it, is the state.

Life is full of joys and sorrows, much of it our own making. Sadly, the West has voted time and time again for bigger government, more inflation, higher taxes and excessive regulation - all policies that have kept us from Adam Smith's vision of an opulent society.

The government sends low-flying helicopters to chase the horses into corrals and then takes them from the plains of the American West to federal holding pens. The government claims it's to save the horses from starvation. Critics claim the real motive is to clear the land for cattle grazing. Critics also say the horses are brutally traumatized.

Chinese citizens have never had the right to really express their opinions; in the constitution it says you can, but in the real world it is more dangerous. In the west people think it's a right they're born with. Here it's a right given by the government, and one that's not really practised.

There's a lot of the Midwest and the West in Justice Rehnquist's approach to constitutional law. And by that I mean a recognition that people know pretty well how to govern themselves, that government that is closest to the people is apt to be more responsive to their legitimate concerns and needs.

The former West Germany was a semi-sovereign political pygmy, protected by America's military might and with barely any foreign policy of its own. As a result, the country has no machinery or tradition of strategic thinking, and most Germans are loth to see their government take the lead.

The crisis of democracy in the West is not the result of falling in love with another system. In Europe and America people who are disillusioned with democracy do not dream about the Chinese model or any other form of authoritarian rule. They do not dream about government that controls Internet and puts in prison those daring to disagree.

Israeli governments cling to the two-state notion because it seems to reflect the sentiments of the Jewish Israeli majority, and it shields the country from international opprobrium even as it camouflages relentless efforts to expand Israel's territory into the West Bank.