Quotes About Government

With 'Hunger Games,' it's about people rising up to fight against a corrupt government that controls them.

This, like all the other British communiqués, was completely untrue. After two years of war, the British government and its servants were finally learning to behave like cads.

The work was to be done 'by undercover men, spies and saboteurs, who, if caught, would be neither acknowledged nor defended by their government'. They would be working outside the law and were to borrow their tactics from guerrillas and gangsters like Michael Collins in Ireland and Al Capone in America. In signing up for Section D, they were effectively signing away their lives.

Martín de Córdoba, a distinguished Augustinian friar, disagreed strongly. In a book he wrote to guide Isabella in the exercise of authority, The Garden of Noble Ladies, he claimed that it was ignorant or old-fashioned to 'believe it evil when some kingdom or other polity falls to a woman's government … I, as I will declare, hold the contrary opinion.

THE OBSESSION of Speer's life after Nuremberg, as I have pointed out, was Hitler's murder of the Jews. The ambivalence, however, was that while he sincerely grasped every opportunity to reiterate his sorrow and his pain at having been–the automatic formula he used–"a part of a government that committed such crimes", he was totally incapable of saying that he had known about them at the time.

If war is too important to trust to generals, then policy is too important to trust to politicians.

The nannyism is partly to distract from the corruption — and partly just another opportunity to leverage it. A good general rule is that the more a government wants to run its citizens' lives, the worse job it will do at the most basic tasks of government.

The government we have now would have been unrecognizable to the Founders, and our acquiescence to its systematic encroachments on liberty would have infuriated them. But here is the point: it would not surprise them.

Rome did not so much fall as collapse under its own weight. Germanic migrations, a corrupt and ineffectual government, insecurity within the borders, a breakdown of trade, and an economy built on slavery when the end of territorial expansion shut down new sources of slaves — all combined to destabilize Roman society. Add to that a colder and wetter climate that made it more difficult to grow crops, and this spelled disaster for at least the western, Latin-speaking half of the Empire.

Never was a government that was not composed of liars, malefactors, and thieves. —Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BC)

The state is more interested in self-aggrandizement and power than it is in promoting the good.

THE BOSTON TEA PARTY On December 16, 1773, American colonists met with representatives of the British government in Boston to discuss turning the thirteen American colonies into a separate country. Tea was served.

All I can think of is that this makes me the greatest seventh-grade president in the history of student government.

There's a lot of discussion about a person called the Bachelor. I think he might be in the government. Also Starbucks—that's a restaurant in Pueblo. It must be superfancy, because all the things you can order have these long foreign names. Oh—and zombies." She shrugs. "We haven't figured out what those are yet. Jewelry, maybe.

In fact, forming new state governments, as Jefferson said in the spring of 1776, was "the whole object of the present controversy." For the aim of the Revolution had become not simply independence from British tyranny, but also the prevention of future tyrannies.

The Americans' new state constitutions would therefore have to be fixed plans—single written documents, as the English constitution had never been—outlining the powers of government and specifying the rights of citizens.

Private associations of men for the purpose of promoting arts, sciences, benevolence or charity are very laudable," declared Noah Webster, but associations formed for political purposes were "dangerous to good government.

Most basic and dangerous of all was the Federalist creation of a huge perpetual federal debt, which, as New York governor George Clinton explained, not only would poison the morals of the people through speculation but would also "add an artificial support to the administration, and by a species of bribery enlist the monied men of the community on the side of the measures of the government. . . . Look to Great Britain.

Both Jefferson and Madison remained convinced to the end of their lives that all parts of America's government had equal authority to interpret the fundamental law of the Constitution—all departments had what Madison called "a concurrent right to expound the constitution.

Consequently, as Samuel Chase pointed out in the Maryland ratifying convention, the states would end up "without power, or respect and despised—they will sink into nothing, and be absorbed in the general government." Some Federalists actually hoped for this to happen—for the states eventually to be reduced to mere administrative units of the national government.

Madison and other supporters of the Consitution--the Federalists as they called themselves--hoped that an expanded national sphere of operation would prevent the clashing interests of the society from combining to create tyrannical majorities in the new national government.

Nathaniel Macon of North Carolina was only one of many Republicans who in the early months of 1812 voted against all attempts to arm and prepare the navy, who opposed all efforts to beef up the War Department, who rejected all tax increases, and yet who in June 1812 voted for the war.

The answer to growing complexity in the social sphere is renewed efforts at participation by each one of us, or else a progressive decline of inert and unquestioning masses submitting to government by an elite which will have little regard for the ultimate interest of the common man.

There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party … and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat.