Quotes About Government

Arbitrary power is but the first natural step from anarchy, or the savage life.

Political power means the capacity to regulate national life through national representatives.

The minute health care becomes a huge, unwieldy, expensive government bureaucracy it's a permanent feature of life and there's nothing anyone can do about it.

Taxes grow without rain.

Without a sound legal system, a small group or even a single person can take control of an entire country.

This is the most frightening lesson of the Cultural Revolution: Without a sound legal system, a small group or even a single person can take control of an entire country. This is as true now as it was then. Thirty

This is the most frightening lesson of the Cultural Revolution: Without a sound legal system, a small group or even a single person can take control of an entire country. This is as true now as it was then.

As James Madison explained, the Constitution is "of no more consequence than the paper on which it is written, unless it be stamped with the approbation of those to whom it is addressed Ã¢â'¬Â¦ THE PEOPLE THEMSELVES.

the start of a new era, in which the course of history might be made predictable and a government established that would be ruled not by accident and force but by reason and choice. The origins of that idea, and its fate, are the story of American history.

Between 1941 and 1946, the federal government spent more than it had from 1789 to 1941.

A corrupt monarchy is a tyranny, a corrupt aristocracy an oligarchy, and a corrupt polity a democracy.

In 1787, then, when Alexander Hamilton asked "whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force," that was the kind of question a scientist asks before beginning an experiment.

Vietnamese men, women, and children were dying, starving, being shot, bombed, burned, and napalmed. American soldiers were being shipped home in boxes, coffins, and bags. And the U.S. government was paying an Upper West Side Freudian analyst to explain that the Vietnamese, as a people, had Oedipal issues.

If the United States were to acquire territory from Mexico, and if this territory were to enter the Union, would Mexicans become American citizens? Calhoun, now in the Senate, vehemently opposed this idea. "I protest against the incorporation of such a people," he declared. "Ours is the government of the white man.

would in my will, leave my skin a legacy to the government, desiring that it might be taken off and made into parchment and then bind the Constitution of glorious happy and free America."17 Americans' deepest and most abiding divide turned on this starkly different reading of their Constitution, in what meaning lay between the ink written onto parchment and the scars etched on a black man's back.

Writing in 1837, one Michigan reformer called the nation's rate of immigration "the boldest experiment upon the stability of government ever made in the annals of time.

They said, some men are too ignorant, and vicious, to share in government. Possibly so, said we; and, by your system, you would always keep them ignorant, and vicious. We proposed to give all a chance; and we expected the weak to grow stronger, the ignorant, wiser; and all better, and happier together. We made the experiment; and the fruit is before us. —Abraham Lincoln, "Fragments on Government," 1854

At trial, the judge said, "We are at war and you should not bother the president."3

We hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable," Jefferson began, "that all men are created equal & independant, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent & inalienable, among which are the preservation of life, & liberty, & the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these ends, governments

political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people.

And although it may seem that governments and citizens (in the form of NGOs or civil society organizations) are given somewhat equal access, the truth is that no citizen, not even a director of a powerful NGO, can simply pick up the phone and dial Mark Zuckerberg to complain about a policy decision the way that Israeli prime minister Netanyahu has been known to do.62

The result? An increasingly stratified online world in which the rules about what we can say are determined by a motley crew of elected officials and non-elected elites, some of whom have alarmingly close ties to government.

Israel was among the first governments to secure a backdoor deal with a social media company, but it's far from the last.

By the end of the decade, governments had grown savvy to the fact that companies readily responded to their takedown demands. In 2009, when Google issued its first transparency report documenting government requests for takedowns and user data, the company had received more than one thousand content removal requests in just a six-month period, a number that has only increased over time.