Quotes About Government

The biggest center of attention needs to be the Secretaries of State. They're the ones that manage the elections. At the end of the day, they're the ones that need to be held accountable.

All things flow from the spirit, Master Anderson. Governments are made up of their people. So long as they are men and women of character, the nation stands.

In practice Truman's loyalty program was careless of civil liberties. The very word "loyalty" was problematic, encouraging zealots to bring charges on vague and imprecise grounds. While employees had the right to hear of charges against them, accusers could withhold anything they designated as secret. Government workers did not have the right to know the identity of their accusers—often agents of the FBI—or to confront them in the hearings.

Meanwhile, in the government school, I guess that children were awaiting the arrival of their teachers from the plusher suburbs of Accra, caught in the snarled traffic on the Cape Coast highway, reluctant conscripts to the poor fishing village. No matter, the children could patiently wait, playing on the swings and roundabouts thoughtfully provided by their American donors.

It is not until one visits old, oppressed, suffering Europe, that he can appreciate his own government, he observed, that he realizes the fearful responsibility of the American people to the nations of the whole earth, to carry successfully through the experiment... That men are capable of self-government.

The U.S. Senate presented the most powerful obstacle to any progressive reform.

A government had better go to the very extreme of toleration, than to do aught that could be construed into an interference with, or to jeopardize in any degree, the common rights of its citizens.

became postmaster general, and Edwin M. Stanton, Lincoln's "Mars," eventually became secretary

it was not only the executive's right but his responsibility "to do whatever the needs of the people demand, unless the Constitution or the laws explicitly forbid him to do it.

Each party profited by the offices when in power," Roosevelt explained, "and when in opposition each party insincerely denounced its opponents for doing exactly what it itself had done and intended again to do.

The vice presidency "ought to be abolished," he told his friend Leonard Wood. "The man who occupies it may at any moment be everything; but meanwhile he is practically nothing.

Theodore Roosevelt's father wrote him, I fear for your future. We cannot stand so corrupt a government for any great length of time.

Such men of "towering" egos, in whom ambition is divorced from the people's best interests, were not men to lead a democracy; they were despots.

that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that, government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

idea that government should be used to help those who needed help—the poor, the undereducated, the ill-housed, the elderly, the sick.

faith never foundered that if the people "were taken into the confidence of their government and received a full and truthful statement of what was happening, they would generally choose the right course.

It is no limitation upon property rights or freedom of contract," he noted, "to require that when men receive from government the privilege of doing business under corporate form," they assume an obligation to the public.

He cannot speak clearly if his words must be strained through a Congressional gag.

we have a solemn responsibility to cooperate with the President and produce a program that is neither his blueprint nor our blueprint but a combination of the two.

The great bulwark against a potential dictator is an informed people "attached to the government and laws.

Roosevelt reasoned, "if the Vice-Presidency led to the Governor Generalship of the Philippines, then the question would be entirely altered." That post was the one he desired above all others, even a second gubernatorial term. From the moment the United States acquired the islands as a provision of the treaty in 1899 ending the Spanish-American War, Roosevelt had coveted the job of creating a new government in a Philippines free of Spanish tyranny.

At this introductory stage of his career, Roosevelt viewed politics in a puritanical light, as an arena where good battled evil. He had seen his father's dreams of high office undone by corruption; he had absorbed his father's warning that the country could not much longer stand "so corrupt a government.

With the coal strike, Theodore Roosevelt had grasped the historical moment that signaled the clear emergence of a domestic purpose for his young administration—to restrain the rampant consolidation of corporate wealth that had developed in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. The speed and size of that consolidation, Roosevelt powerfully felt, "accentuates the need of the Government having some power of supervision and regulation over such corporations.

Eleanor had defended over the years, that the money spent on arms would be much better spent on education and medical care.