Quotes About Government

Americans should be free to recognize our religious heritage doing that is not the same as creating a government-sponsored religion.

No government could last more than a month without having to knock on the door of the banks in order to pay its current expenses. If the banks were to refuse, the government would go bankrupt.

Youth must refrain from ungrateful questioning of governmental mandates... Instead, they must dedicate themselves to study, work and military service, should learn to think and act as a mass.

Liberalism is to freedom as anarchism is to anarchy.

Governments change, files remain. The paradox remained: in the dossiers of the State the fact that I had risked my neck for it was simultaneously listed forever as treason. When my name was mentioned, the exalted file clerks in the government offices, who sat on their chairs only because I and people like me allowed them to, made a wry face.

Together with a great number of others I had twice paid the piper for inefficient governments. We had carried off neither pay nor glory – just the opposite.

He was fleeced, robbed; and yet he was the exploiter. The government, unhesitatingly obliging to the majority, pocketed his taxes, and allowed him to be bled.

I am not saying that during the Second World War Germany did not, under the leadership of the National Socialist government, commit crimes.

We too aspire to communism as the most perfect achievement of human solidarity, but it must be anarchist communism, that is, freely desired and accepted, and the means by which the freedom of everyone is guaranteed and can expand; for these reasons we maintain that State communism, which is authoritarian and imposed, is the most hateful tyranny that has ever afflicted, tormented and handicapped mankind.

Governments oppress mankind in two ways, either directly, by brute force, that is physical violence, or indirectly, by depriving them of the means of subsistence and thus reducing them to helplessness at discretion.

There can be no doubt that the Anarchist Idea, denying government, is by its very nature opposed to violence, which is the essence of every authoritarian system - the mode of action of every government

A society without a government, which would act by free, voluntary co-operation, trusting entirely to the spontaneous action of those interested, and founded altogether on solidarity and sympathy, is certainly, they say, a very beautiful ideal, but, like all ideals, it is a castle in the air.

Anarchists are justifiably opposed to authoritarian communism, which presupposes a government wanting to direct every aspect of social life, and placing the organization of production and the distribution of wealth under the orders of its nominees, which cannot but create the most hateful tyranny and the crippling of all the living forces in society.

Communism made through the will of a government instead of through the direct and voluntary work of groups of workers does not really appeal to me. If it was possible, it would be the most suffocating tyranny to which human society has ever been subjected.

Con l'odio, se si vince, si possono fondare nuovi governi, ma non si può fondare l'anarchia.

The government, or as some call it, the justiciary State, as moderator in the social struggle and the impartial administrator of the public interest, is a lie — an illusion, an utopia never achieved and never to be realised.

Lottare per l'emancipazione integrale, aspettando e preparando il giorno in cui essa sarà possibile, strappare al governo ed ai capitalisti tutti quei miglioramenti politici ed economici che possono migliorare per noi le condizioni della lotta ed aumentare il numero di coloro che lottano coscientemente. E perciò strapparli con mezzi che non implichino il riconoscimento degli ordini attuali e preparino le vie dell'avvenire.

Il dilemma innanzi a cui si troverà la rivoluzione resta sempre: o organizzarsi volontariamente a vantaggio di tutti o essere organizzati per forza da un governo a vantaggio di una classe dominante.

Anche il generale Bonaparte servì a difendere la rivoluzione francese contro la reazione europea, ma nel difenderla la strozzò. Lenin, Trotsky e compagni sono di sicuro dei rivoluzionari sinceri, così come essi intendono la rivoluzione, e non tradiranno; ma essi preparano i quadri governativi che serviranno a quelli che verranno dopo per profittare della rivoluzione ed ucciderla. Essi saranno le prime vittime del loro metodo, e con loro, io temo, cadrà la rivoluzione.

A Foreign Office diplomat in London wrote in the margins of a Tehran report: "I tend to the view that Musaddiq still enjoys some public support, more than some of our close friends would have us believe. . . . Coup d'état may well be the only answer.

The Fourth Amendment protects people, not property, the Court stressed. A person's Fourth Amendment rights do not depend on where he or she is at the time of the government intrusion, nor on whether a physical trespass occurs.

Congress also should change the federal civil rights statute, 42 U.S. Code Section 1983, to hold cities liable for the misconduct of their police officers.

Although the federal and state governments rarely can be sued because they are protected by sovereign immunity,47 the Supreme Court has held that local governments—cities and counties—do not have sovereign immunity.48

the Court has ruled that government officials who are sued for monetary damages—whether they are federal officers sued under Bivens or state or local officers sued under Section 1983—have an immunity defense. Step by step it has found that many in the criminal justice system—judges, prosecutors, and police officers as witnesses—are absolutely immune from being sued.