Quotes About Government

As there was no form of government common to the peoples thus segregated, nor tie of language, history, habit or belief, they were called a Republic.

Despite their promises at the last Election, the politicians had not yet changed the climate.

The European powers independently decided that they did not want that profitless piece of territory; that the one thing less desirable than seeing a neighbor established there, was the trouble of taking it themselves. Accordingly, by general consent, it was ruled off the maps and its immunity guaranteed. As there was no form of government common to the peoples thus segregated, nor tie of language, history, habit or belief, they were called a Republic.

Under this liberal and progressive regime, the republic may be said, in some ways, to have prospered.

I was promoted to be a major, and every Allied government gave me a decoration—even Montenegro, little Montenegro down on the Adriatic Sea!

The clean book bill will be one of the most immoral measures ever adopted. It will throw American art back into the junk heap.

In 1945, when the male soldiers started coming back home from Europe, she and all the other women pilots that had served as WASPs during the war were unceremoniously told to go home and never received a dime or even thanks from the government.

Honey, that's one thing you be sure and you get on right away, is your Medicaid, you don't want to be caught without that.

Well, they are trying to get rid of Christianity and once they do that, then you watch. Our taxes will go up and they'll take all our guns away and the next thing you know, a communist or a socialist will get in the White House and then it will be all over.

repeatedly proposed that the state pay for universal primary education as well as fund education at later stages. He was met with opposition from many quarters, mostly those wary of big government or higher taxes. Yet interestingly, one of his most ardent supporters was an old friend and political opponent, the conservative John Adams.

America has become what Francis Fukuyama calls a "vetocracy." The system of checks and balances, replicated at every level of government, ensures that someone, somewhere can always block any positive action. The United States has become a nation of naysayers.

America's problems—from ineffective government to patchy health care to vicious polarization.

Good government is about limited power but clear lines of authority. It is about giving officials autonomy, discretion, and the ability to exercise their own judgment. It requires recruiting bright, devoted people who are inspired by the chance to serve their country and earn respect for doing it. This is not something that can be created overnight, but it can be done. Taiwan and South Korea were not born with good government.

The real test for the United States is political—and it rests not just with America at large but with Washington in particular.

The Fed's action is, as the saying goes, socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor.

For many decades, the world needed to learn from America. But now America needs to learn from the world. And what it most needs to learn about is government—not big or small but good government.

Consider the automobile industry. For a century after 1894, most of the cars manufactured in North America were made in Michigan. Since 2004, Michigan has been replaced by Ontario, Canada. The reason is simple: health care. In America, car manufacturers have to pay $6,500 in medical and insurance costs for every worker. If they move a plant to Canada, which has a government-run health care system, the cost to the manufacturer is around $800 per worker. In 2006, General Motors paid

Today's self-professed socialists want greater government investment, new and expanded safety nets, a "Green New Deal" to address climate change, and higher taxes on the rich. Bernie Sanders himself makes clear his

War almost always meant taxation, which ended up putting pressure on government to provide more services for its people. One of the reasons that tiny Britain became such a formidable modern state and then built a global empire was that its many conflicts in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries helped it develop not only a superb navy but also an impressive fiscal machine.

I should have paid greater attention to my mentor in graduate school, Samuel Huntington, who once explained that Americans never recognize that, in the developing world, the key is not the kind of government — communist, capitalist, democratic, dictatorial — but the degree of government. That absence of government is what we are watching these days, from Libya to Iraq to Syria. ("Why they still hate us, 13 years later," Washington Post, 09/05/2014)

There is pride in good government.

America is, in its DNA, an anti-statist country. The Right comes at it by defunding government. The Left does it by encumbering it with so many rules and requirements that it has a similar dysfunctional effect. As the political theorist Samuel Huntington once explained, power in America is not divided, as is often said, but rather shared and contested, so that you need broad agreement and compromise to get anything done.

Having voted in ways that ensure gridlock, Americans point to that very gridlock and despair that any good can come from Washington.

common element? A competent, well-functioning, trusted state—the quality of government.