Quotes About Government

Few ideas have more profoundly poisoned the minds of more people than the notion of a "free market" existing somewhere in the universe, into which government "intrudes.

A market—any market—requires that government make and enforce the rules of the game. In most modern democracies, such rules emanate from legislatures, administrative agencies, and courts. Government doesn't "intrude" on the "free market." It creates the market.

So the government spent five million dollars on a report to expunge the English language of such words as 'manpower', 'mannerism', 'manoeuvre' etc so any feminists working on the government payroll wouldn't be offended. Which should be very comforting to the next homeless kid sleeping near a manhole cover, thought Les, to know that he is now sleeping next to a personhole cover.

As government regulations grow slowly, we become used to the harness. Habit is a powerful force, and we no longer feel as intensely as we once would have [the] constriction of our liberties that would have been utterly intolerable a mere half century ago.

U.S. Internal Revenue Service: an agency modeled after the revenue raising concepts of the 19th century economist, Jesse James.

If a language is corruptible, then a constitution written in that language is corruptible.

In the ensuing "higher phase" of communist society, which became known among Marxists as "communism" or "full communism," the modern productive powers that had been developed but fettered by capitalism would be completely liberated, material plenty would be achieved, people would be remunerated according to need, and government in the old repressive sense would cease to exist.[570]

it was the higher party organs, notably the Central Committee and its subcommittee, the Politburo, that decided Soviet policy in both internal and external affairs, and the government evolved as the party's main executive agency.

Since the party was the ruling political authority in the Soviet state, it was not as chief of government but as head of the party that Lenin acted as supreme leader.

the nationality policy

He spent the next three weeks in the Siberian centers of Novosibirsk, Barnaul, Rubtsovsk, and Omsk conferring with local party and government officials and dictating the line they were to follow. Here at last he found an opportunity to practice the "Leninist hardness" that he had foreseen would be necessary in the revolutionary process of building Soviet socialism.

he advocated a strategy of pressing forward from the stage of democratic revolution represented in the Provisional Government to that of socialist revolution via the seizure of power and establishment of a "dictatorship of the proletariat." In an effort to validate this position ideologically, Lenin went back to his Marxist texts during an interval of forced inactivity during 1917 and wrote The State and Revolution, his principal work of political theory.

The party-state structure still showed considerable looseness in organization and mode of functioning.

succession means legitimacy as well as power.

There used to be this feeling under Eisenhower and Kennedy and Roosevelt and Truman that government was a solution. Trust in the presidency fell precipitously under Johnson - real lows. And it's never come back. It's a trend that, if you're liberal, is really discouraging.

I intend to open this country up to democracy and anyone who is against that I will jail, I will crush."—João Baptista Figueiredo, President of Brazil (1979)

To put it crudely, in cortical democracies citizens reason together; in limbic democracies they feel together.

Which meant the State Care population was continually rising while its budget remained fixed.

Civil government cannot let any group ride roughshod over others simply because their consciences tell them to do so.

It is not the function of our Government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the Government from falling into error.

The Constitution is not a suicide pact.

But none of these men before you acted in minor parts. Each of them was entrusted with broad discretion and exercised great power. Their responsibility is correspondingly great and may not be shifted to that fictional being, "the State", which cannot be produced for trial, cannot testify, and cannot be sentenced.

He remembered a line of graffiti scrawled by White Rose on a wall near Werderscher Markt: 'A police state is a country run by criminals'.

Harshaw concluded that man, a social animal, could not avoid government, any more than an individual could escape bondage to his bowels