Quotes About Government

In every society," Kames concluded, "the advances of government toward perfection are strictly proportioned to the advance of society" toward mutual cooperation and improvement. The better we all get along, in other words, the more benign our rulers can afford to be.

For Plato, we find our true freedom only when we find our proper place within the political community. Aristotle, by contrast, concludes that community exists to serve the individuals who make it up, not the other way around.

Aristotle's free society is one in which the citizens participate in their government rather than submit to it. All will be rulers in one way or another, at one time or another. "This means some rule, and others are ruled, in turn, as if they had become, for the time being, different persons.

For Hume, self-interest is all there is. The overriding guiding force in all our actions is not our reason, or our sense of obligation toward others, or any innate moral sense—all these are simply formed out of habit and experience—but the most basic human passion of all, the desire for self-gratification. It is the one thing human beings have in common. It is also the necessary starting point of any system of morality, and of any system of government

Having seen how the democratic sausage was made, Plato was in no mood to sit at the feast.

his real point was not that a market-based order was perfect or even perfectible. Rather, it was more beneficial, and ultimately more rational, than ones put together by politicians or rulers, who are themselves creatures of their own passions and whims.

We establish government precisely to put a check on other people's avidity for our personal goods. Where property is, laws and government follow, not out of keen desire for them, but out of necessity.

Locke's Two Treatises of Government revealed that the political universe is run the same way, through natural laws that guide men's behavior in the same sure way that they guide the movement of the planets.

The military masters of Germany have filled our unsuspecting communities with vicious spies and conspirators and have sought to corrupt the opinion of our people . . . [These persons] seek to undermine the Government with false professions of loyalty to its principles."23

In his grand theory of the state published in 1651, titled Leviathan, Hobbes insisted that the transfer of a people's self-sovereignty to a monarch and king did indeed take place but it was a onetime transaction. Once it was complete, there was no going back, ever.

Proper government is not a restraint on our natural liberty, as Hobbes and others thought. It is a net increase, since it provides a framework of security in which we can enjoy our civil liberties in ways not possible in the state of nature. It "is the one great reason of men putting themselves into Society, and quitting the State of Nature.

Petrograd (St. Petersburg's new name since the outbreak of war, when the government decided that "St. Petersburg" sounded Teutonic)

Wilson's ringing words on receiving the news—"a little band of wilful men representing no opinion but their own, have rendered the great Government of the United States helpless and contemptible"—

His Majesty's Government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.

And you can't have a prosperous economy when the government is way overspending, raising tax rates, printing too much money, over regulating and restricting free trade. It just can't be done.

What I'm not saying is that all government spending is bad. It's not - far, far from it, but there is no free lunch, as a former colleague of mine used to say. There is no public tooth fairy. Father Christmas does not work on the Treasury staff this year. You can never bail someone out of trouble without putting someone else into trouble.

Our markets have not achieved their great successes as a result of government fiat, but rather through efforts of competing interests working to meet the demands of investors and to fulfill the promises posed by advancing technology.

The answer to the runaway Presidency is not the messenger-boy Presidency. The American democracy must discover a middle ground between making the President a czar and making him a puppet.

ment Agency, which did such a wonderful job on Hur icane Katrina). Funding for the FEMA investigation was only $600,000 and it appears that

The labour movement had the best opportunity in 50 years to transform not merely an industrial situation and win an important battle for workers in struggle, but an opportunity to change the government of the day.

The genius of impeachment lay in the fact that it could punish the man without punishing the office.

But under the righteous government of God no one is wretched who does not deserve to be so. The objects of mercy, then, are those who are miserable, and all misery is the result of sin, hence the miserable are deserving of punishment not mercy. To speak of deserving mercy is a contradiction of terms.

And in terms of their crown jewel legislative achievement: who knew that when asked, 'will government impose a new federal mandate requiring middle class Americans to buy health insurance whether they can afford it or not?' The answer would be 'Yes we can!'

Cuando un papa, Pío XII en este caso, llama a un país nación elegida por Dios, baluarte inexpugnable de la fe católica, está claro que quien gobierna ese país va a estar un rato largo gobernándolo.