Quotes About Government

Yet among the countries most comparable to the United States and where democratic institutions have long existed without breakdown, not one has adopted our American constitutional system. It would be fair to say that without a single exception they have all rejected it.

a majority when united by a common interest or passion cannot be restrained from oppressing the minority, what remedy can be found in a republican Government, where the majority must ultimately decide?

The Bill of Rights slipped quietly into the Constitution and passed from sight and public consciousness until given a new and very different life by the Supreme Court more than a century later.

The universe never did make sense I suspect it was built on government contract.

When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know, the end result is tyranny and oppression no matter how holy the motives.

Secrecy is the beginning of tyranny.

I don't dream about the President any more, and when I talk to my friends, I find they don't either. The Great Leader is a hollow man, the Law of the Market cannot prove itself, and the Nation State mocks its own values.

The Right's view of government and the Left's view of big business are both correct.

You know, I have found a new way to get high and stay spaced out for hours on end, and the government can't stop me... It's called senility.

Wouldn't if be nice if our government, could make things beautiful because everybody cares!

Government.... the scariest thing we face every Halloween... every day of every year!

Is there no virtue among us?" asked James Madison, rhetorically. "If there be not, no form of government can render us secure. To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people is a chimerical idea.

Our compact is not just with those who are alive today. It's also with those who have come before us and those yet to be born. To the founding fathers, the Constitution and our system of government established a moral bond connecting generations. "There seems…to be some foundation in the nature of things, in the relation which one generation bears to another, for the descent of obligations from one to another

After examining 1,799 policy issues in detail, two eminent researchers, Princeton professor Martin Gilens and Professor Benjamin Page of Northwestern University, concluded that "the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.

This pattern offers a valuable lesson for would-be rulers: When it comes to freedoms, it is more dangerous to have given for a while than never to have given at all. The problem for a government that seeks to improve the political and economic status of a traditionally oppressed group is that, in so doing, it establishes freedoms for the group where none existed before. Should these now established freedoms become less available, there will be an especially hot variety of hell to pay.

the public good, the real welfare of the great body of the people, is the supreme object to be pursued; and that no form of government whatever has any other value than as it may be fitted for the attainment of this object.

At the same time, most of what government does that helps them is now so deeply woven into the thread of daily life that it's no longer recognizable as government.

In all, 62 percent of the budget cuts would come from low-income programs. Yet at the same time, the Republican budget would provide a substantial tax cut to the rich—who are already taking home an almost unprecedented share of the nation's total income.

The problem is not the size of government but whom the government is for.

As the economic historian Karl Polanyi recognized, those who argue for "less government" are really arguing for a different government—often one that favors them or their patrons.1

With declining state and local spending, total public spending on education, infrastructure, and basic research has dropped from 12 percent of GDP in the 1970s to less than 3 percent in 2011.

Forget what you may have learned about the choice between the "free market" and government. A market cannot exist without a government to organize and enforce it. The important question is whom the market has been organized to serve.

The system is created by people. The question is, 'Which people?' The central issue is not more or less government. It's 'Who is government for?'. In other words, it's all a question of power — who has it and who doesn't.

How else can you explain why the Street was bailed out with no strings attached? Or why taxpayers didn't get equity in the banks we bailed out—as Warren Buffett got when he bailed out Goldman Sachs—so when the banks became profitable again, we didn't get any of the upside gains?