Quotes About Government

That MMS wasn't fully equipped to do its job, in large part because for the past thirty years a big chunk of American voters had bought into the Republican idea that government was the problem and that business always knew better, and had elected leaders who made it their mission to gut environmental regulations, starve agency budgets, denigrate civil servants, and allow industrial polluters do whatever the hell they wanted to do.

well as programs like the GI Bill that made a college education available to millions, government

The receptionist's salary, on the other hand, was taxed at almost twice that rate once FICA was included. From Buffett's perspective, the discrepancy was

It's like moving-in day on a college campus, except a large percentage of the people involved are middle-aged, in suits, and, along with you, charged with running the most powerful nation on earth.

Still, I couldn't shake the fear that Putin's way of doing business had more force and momentum than I cared to admit, that in the world as it was, many of these hopeful activists might soon be marginalized or crushed by their own government—and there'd be very little I could do to protect them.

forty-two presidents.

Conservatives may be right when they argue that the government should not try to determine executive pay packages. But conservatives should at least be willing to speak out against unseemly behavior in corporate boardrooms with the same moral force, the same sense of outrage that they direct against dirty rap lyrics.

Let's be honest. Sometimes art is dangerous, though. And that's why governments sometimes get nervous about art. But one of the things I truly believe is if you try to suppress the arts, then I think you are suppressing the deepest dreams and aspirations of the people.

elections alone don't produce a functioning democracy;

For the first time since its founding in 1949, NATO invoked Article 5 of its charter, agreeing that the armed attack on one of its members shall be considered an attack against them all. With justice at our backs and the world by our side, we drove the Taliban government out of Kabul in just over a month.

Across the U.S. government, the possibility that some sort of populist uprising might bring down one of our allies had historically been met with resignation: Sure, it was likely to happen, the same way a bad hurricane will hit the Gulf Coast or the Big One will hit California; but since we couldn't say exactly when or where, and since we didn't have the means to stop it anyway, the best thing to do was prepare contingency plans and get ready to manage the aftershocks.

I was learning yet another difficult lesson about the presidency: that my heart was now chained to strategic considerations and tactical analysis, my convictions subject to counterintuitive arguments; that in the most powerful office on earth, I had less freedom to say what I meant and act on what I felt than I'd had as a senator—or as an ordinary citizen disgusted by the sight of a young woman gunned down by her own government.

the lie has become not just a moral category but a pillar of the State.

was nice to know, as one executive assured us, that without the Recovery Act "the entire solar and wind industry in the U.S. would've probably been wiped out." That didn't stop me from wondering how long we could keep championing policies that paid long-term dividends but still somehow resulted in us getting clobbered over the head. —

Still, for both policy and political reasons, I felt that progressives couldn't afford to ignore economics. Those of us who believed in the government's ability to solve big problems had an obligation to pay attention to the real-world impact of our decisions and not just trust in the goodness of our intentions.

Accepting that African Americans and other minority groups might need extra help from the government—that their specific hardships could be traced to a brutal history of discrimination rather than immutable characteristics or individual choices—required a level of empathy, of fellow feeling, that many white voters found difficult to muster.

The fruit vendor's anguish set off weeks of nationwide demonstrations against the Tunisian government, and on January 14, 2011, Ben Ali and his family fled to Saudi Arabia. Meanwhile, similar protests, made up mostly of young people, were beginning to happen in Algeria, Yemen, Jordan, and Oman, the first flickers of what became known as the Arab Spring.

This was precisely the scenario my Presidential Study Directive had sought to avoid: the U.S. government suddenly caught between a repressive but reliable ally and a population insistent on change, voicing the democratic aspirations we claimed to stand for.

An auto factory that had threatened to close was still open, while a mortgage refinancing was keeping someone out there from losing a home.

I found myself imagining what America might look like if we could rally the country so that our government brought the same level of expertise and determination to educating our children or housing the homeless as it had to getting bin Laden; if we could apply the same persistence and resources to reducing poverty or curbing greenhouse gases or making sure every family had access to decent day care. I knew that even my own staff would dismiss these notions as utopian.

CONTRARY TO THE BELIEFS of many in the Arab world (and more than a few American reporters), the United States is not a grand puppet master whimsically pulling the strings of the countries with which it does business. Even governments that rely on our military and economic assistance think first and foremost of their own survival, and the Mubarak regime was no exception. After

In other words, if you wanted good government, then expertise mattered. You needed public institutions stocked with people whose job it was to pay attention to important stuff so the rest of us citizens didn't have to.

Although my government has been talking quite a bit about protecting and helping middle America, what I have seen has been to the contrary. I see a government that has been catering to lobbyists and special interest groups. I see billions of dollars that are being spent on bailouts for financial institutions…

Congress had come to effectively require 60 votes in the Senate, or what was often referred to as a "supermajority.