Quotes About Government

I have often wondered about a paradox in American government: Every four years, voters elect a president and in California a governor, the only officeholders elected by all the people; then, the same people in their individual districts turn around and elect a legislature and congress that is often controlled by the opposing party, enabling it to prevent the president or governor from carrying out the things they elected him or her to do.

AT THE END OF WORLD WAR II, I was a New Dealer to the core. I thought government could solve all our postwar problems just as it had ended the Depression and won the war. I didn't trust big business. I thought government, not private companies, should own our big public utilities; if there wasn't enough housing to shelter the American people, I thought government should build it; if we needed better medical care, the answer was socialized medicine.

There probably isn't any undertaking on earth short of assuring the national security that can't be handled more efficiently by the forces of private enterprise than by the federal government.

No government has ever voluntarily reduced itself in size—and that, in a way, became my theme.

The federal government must and shall quit this business of relief. Continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber.

As I have often said, governments don't produce economic growth, people do.

James Madison said in 1788: "Since the general civilization of mankind, I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachment of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.

Deficits, as I've often said, aren't caused by too little taxing, they are caused by too much spending. Presidents don't create deficits, Congress does. Presidents can't appropriate a dollar of taxpayers' money; only congressmen can—and Congress is susceptible to all sorts of influences that have nothing to do with good government.

On the streets of Moscow, looking into thousands of faces, I was reminded once again that it's not people who make war, but governments—and people deserve governments that fight for peace in the nuclear age.

Many countries of the world, I said, had constitutions, but in almost every case they were documents in which governments told their people what they could do. The United States had a constitution, I said, that was different from all the others because in it the people tell their government what it can do. Its three most important words are "We the people," its most important principle, freedom.

Government's first duty is to protect the people, not run their lives

I have wondered at times what the Ten Commandments would have looked like if Moses had run them through the US Congress.

Tal vez nuestro sistema democrático esté también a punto de suicidarse. A veces los pueblos deciden arrojarse al abismo.

Because, once again, our government—and I'm speaking not just of the regional government, but of the planetary one as well—is concealing information. Concealing it, or what would be even worse, it's not aware of it, because we're in the hands of the most incompetent politicians humanity has ever had in its history.

That Roman Peace was designed to last forever. When Diocletian perfected it, its economy was so thoroughly planned and so well administered that farmers could no longer farm nor workers work, and Government took care of them on the relief that taxes provided, until the increasing taxes pushed so many farmers and workers onto tax-supported relief that there was not enough productive energy left to pay the taxes, and the Roman empire with its world peace collapsed into the Dark Ages.

Since Government's planned economy has always kept people poor, the almost static living conditions through all Old World history seem to verify the pagan belief in a static universe. All Old World thinking about economics assumes that wealth cannot be increased, but must be divided.

In addition to all that, a man may have any opinions he likes without that being any of the sovereign's business. Having no standing in the other world, the sovereign has no concern with what may lie in wait for its subjects in the life to come, provided they are good citizens in this life.

In any real democracy, magistracy isn't a benefit—it's a burdensome responsibility that can't fairly be imposed on one individual rather than another

The form of colonialism that the Indigenous peoples of North America have experienced was modern from the beginning: the expansion of European corporations, backed by government armies, into foreign areas, with subsequent expropriation of lands and resources. Settler colonialism is a genocidal policy.

With traumatized Navajos watching, government agents shot sheep and goats and left them to rot or cremated them after dousing them with gasoline. At one site alone, thirty-five goats were shot and left to rot. One hundred fifty thousand goats and fifty thousand sheep were killed in this manner. Oral history interviews tell of the pressure tactics on the Navajos, including arrests of those who resisted, and express bitterness over the destruction of their livestock.

Washington and the other founders of the United States designed a governmental and economic structure to serve the private property interests of each and all of the primary actors, nearly all of them slavers and land speculators.

political position. Back in

It isn't right for the artist to become the servant of the state.

And as for the city itself - it was to be the capital of Maharashtra; or of both Maharashtra and Gujarat; or an independent state of its own...while the government tried to work out what on earth to do, the city's inhabitants decided to encourage it to be quick. Riots proliferated..