Quotes About Government

If a building is a historical building, the government may give you a tax credit, which is far better than a tax deduction, to improve your investment

America today is less a democracy and more an oligarchy.

In fact, if your investment is not over $5 million, it's hard to get anyone in the government to become interested in your property.

focus more on acquiring larger pieces of real estate with the help of government funding.

The laws prohibiting suicide and providing punishment for any attempt at self-destruction have been repealed. The Government has seen fit to acknowledge the right of man to end an existence which may have become intolerable to him, through physical suffering or mental despair.

Permitting businesses and special interests to fund political campaigns encourages demagoguery and invites corruption. That is not government of the people, by the people, and for the people. It's government of, by, and for money.

They were untouched by modern education, but their government was striving with might and main to procure this inestimable benefit for them; anticlericalism and American bustle would soon free them from belief in miracles and holy likenesses.

the British Government became determined that when victory came they should be in a position to impose terms, not only on the defeated enemy, but also on their victorious allies.

If the French Government had deliberately intended to inflict further torment and loss on their long-suffering soldiers they could hardly have done better than appoint General Nivelle to the post of Commander-in-Chief.

As suggested by this definition, not all nations are states and not all states are nations.

The ability of so many people to live comfortably with the idea of capital punishment is perhaps a clue to how so many Europeans were able to live with the idea of the Holocaust: Once you accept the notion that the state has the right to kill someone and the right to define what is a capital crime, aren't you halfway there?

A chief attraction of the real bills theory was that it took decisions regarding the money supply out of human hands. John Carlisle, Treasury secretary under Cleveland, maintained that issuing notes "is not a proper function of the Treasury Department, or of any other department of the Government." The task was just too difficult. Rather, Carlisle said, currency should be "regulated entirely by the business interests of the people and by the laws of trade.

Top-down government breeds irresponsible individuals, and the confiscation of civil society by the state leads to a widespread refusal among the citizens to act for themselves.

The American liberal is certainly not averse to the power of the state, provided it is exerted by liberals, and exerted against conservatives.

Top-down solutions have a tendency to confiscate problems from those whose problems they are.

What makes a political order legitimate, in the conservative view, is not the free choices that create it, but the free choices that it creates.

In place of top-down government, Burke made the case for a society shaped from below, by traditions that have grown from our natural need to associate. The important social traditions are not just arbitrary customs, which might or might not have survived into the modern world. They are forms of knowledge. They contain the residues of many trials and errors, as people attempt to adjust their conduct to the conduct of others. To

The author assumed that the main task of government is to distribute the collective wealth of society among its members, and that, in the matter of distribution, the government is uniquely competent. The fact that wealth can be distributed only if it is first created seemed to have escaped his notice.

At the same time, instead of limiting the power of the state, alleged human rights have begun to enhance that power, and to bring the state into all our disputes on the side of the favoured party. Rights

The Anglo-American tradition of constitutional thinking should be understood in this way, as addressing the question of how to limit the power of government, without losing its benefits. That

accountable government does not come through elections. It comes through respect for law, through public spirit and through a culture of confession. To think that there is a merely accidental connection between those virtues and our Judaeo-Christian heritage is to live in cloud cuckoo land. It is to overlook the culture that has focused, down the centuries, on the business of repentance.

Thus began a long connection with the unofficial networks in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, through which I learned to see socialism in another way – not as a dream of idealists, but as a real system of government, imposed from above and maintained by force.

Political order, in short, requires cultural unity, something that politics itself can never provide.

When society is organised from above, either by the top-down government of a revolutionary dictatorship, or by the impersonal edicts of an inscrutable bureaucracy, then accountability rapidly disappears from the political order, and from society, too. Top-down government breeds irresponsible individuals, and the confiscation of civil society by the state leads to a widespread refusal among the citizens to act for themselves.