Quotes About Government

Accountable government does not come through elections. It comes through respect for law, through public spirit and through a culture of confession.

Government is not what so many conservatives believe it to be, and what people on the left always believe it to be when it is in other hands than their own – namely a system of power and domination.

accountable government does not come through elections. It comes through respect for law, through public spirit and through a culture of confession. To

Now you know what an absolute monarchy is she explained to Bill. You can see how power corrupts. I was corrupt before I had power, Random said, and rich is better.

There must be a lot of duplication in our country's laws, said Dukhi. Every time there are elections, they talk of passing the same ones passed twenty years ago. Someone should remind them they need to apply the laws. For politicians, passing laws is like passing water, said Narayan. It all ends down the drain.

The task of government was not to stop selfish striving—a hopeless task—but to harness it for the public good.

If he had wanted to impose a monarchy upon America, Hamilton said, he would follow the classic path of a populist demagogue: "I would mount the hobbyhorse of popularity, I would cry out usurpation, danger to liberty etc. etc. I would endeavour to prostrate the national government, raise a ferment, and then ride in the whirlwind and direct the storm.

a dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people than under the forbidding appearance of zeal for the firmness and efficiency of government.

This falling-out was to be more than personal, for the rift between Hamilton and Madison precipitated the start of the two-party system in America. The funding debate shattered the short-lived political consensus that had ushered in the new government. For the next five years, the political spectrum in America was defined by whether people endorsed or opposed Alexander Hamilton's programs.

Whoever considers the nature of our government with discernment will see that though obstacles and delays will frequently stand in the way of the adoption of good measures, yet when once adopted, they are likely to be stable and permanent. It will be far more difficult to undo than to do.

he warned that progressive accumulation of debt "is perhaps the NATURAL DISEASE of all Governments. And it is not easy to conceive anything more likely than this to lead to great and convulsive revolutions of Empire.

To those who feared oppressive taxes, Hamilton made an argument that anticipated "supply-side economics" of the late twentieth century, saying that officials "can have no temptation to abuse this power, because the motive of revenue will check its own extremes. Experience has shown that moderate duties are more productive than high ones."10

Tis with governments as with individuals, first impressions and early habits give a lasting bias to the temper and character.

factions can become "potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government.

This was a powerful argument for Washington, who had gone to Philadelphia feeling that the war would be incomplete without a new Constitution; now, he knew, the Constitution would be incomplete without an effective new government.

If Washington was the father of the country and Madison the father of the Constitution, then Alexander Hamilton was surely the father of the American government.

task of government was not to stop selfish striving—a hopeless task—but to harness it for the public good.

the government must degenerate either into an absolute and despotic monarchy or a tyrannical aristocracy.

He railed against the baleful precedent that would be set if the legislature exiled an entire category of people without hearings or trials. If that happened, "no man can be safe, nor know when he may be the innocent victim of a prevailing faction. The name of liberty applied to such a government would be a mockery of common sense.

his view that in framing a government "every man ought to be supposed a knave and to have no other end in all his actions but private interests." The task of government was not to stop selfish striving—a hopeless task—but to harness it for the public good.

he worried that a separate senate, elected solely by propertied voters, will "degenerate into a body purely aristocratical.

At the Constitutional Convention, Elbridge Gerry had bawdily likened standing armies to a tumescent penis: "An excellent assurance of domestic tranquillity, but a dangerous temptation to foreign adventure.

The inquiry constantly is what will please, not what will benefit the people," he told Morris. "In such a government there can be nothing but temporary expedient, fickleness, and folly.

Hamilton warned that "a dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people than under the forbidding appearance of zeal for the firmness and efficiency of government.