Quotes About Government

Bureaucracy is always a government of experts, of an "experienced minority" which has to resist as well as it knows how the constant pressure from "the inexperienced majority

Compared with the mobilization of all opponents to the government as such, the capturing of lower middle-class votes was a temporary phenomenon.

Het Smolensk-archief heeft duidelijk gemaakt in welke mate elk onderzoek van deze periode uit de Russische geschiedenis blijvend gehinderd zal worden door het ontbreken van de meest elementaire documenten en statistieken. [...]Kortom, we leren niets uit de organisatiestructuur van het regime, terwijl we daar in het geval van nazi-Duitsland zeer goed over geïnformeerd zijn.

In a sense, economic power could bring governments to heel because they had the same faith in economics as the plain businessmen who had somehow convinced them that the state's means of violence had to be used exclusively for protection of business interests and national property.

We have become so used to thinking of domestic politics in terms of party politics that we are inclined to forget that the conflict between [the party system and the council system] has always been a conflict between parliament, the source and seat of power of the party system, and the people, who have surrendered their power to their representatives.

It now became clear that full national sovereignty was possible only as long as the comity of European nations existed; for it was this spirit of unorganized solidarity and agreement that prevented any government's exercise of its full sovereign power.

Small as these first antisemitic parties were, they at once distinguished themselves from all other parties. They made the original claim that they were not a party among parties but a party "above all parties." In the class-and party-ridden nation-state, only the state and the government had ever claimed to be above all parties and classes, to represent the nation as a whole.

Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless we have a tyranny without a tyrant.

Le système de gouvernement représentatif connaît aujourd'hui une crise en partie parce qu'il a perdu, avec le temps, toutes les institutions qui pouvaient permettre une participation effective des citoyens et, d'autre part, parce qu'il est gravement atteint par le mal qui affecte le système des partis: la bureaucratisation et la tendance des deux partis à ne représenter que leurs appareils.

Only where great masses are superfluous or can be spared without disastrous results of depopulation is totalitarian rule, as distinguished from a totalitarian movement, at all possible.

democratic government had rested as much on the silent approbation and tolerance of the indifferent and inarticulate sections of the people as on the articulate and visible institutions and organizations of the country.

Decisive in our context is that totalitarian government is different from dictatorships and tyrannies; the ability to distinguish between them is by no means an academic issue which could be safely left to the "theoreticians," for total domination is the only form of government with which coexistence is not possible.

The task of the totalitarian police is not to discover crimes, but to be on hand when the government decides to arrest a certain category of the population.

The task of the totalitarian police is not to discover crimes, but to be on hand when the government decides to arrest a certain category of the population. The operation of the secret police, on the contrary, miraculously sees to it that the victim never existed at all.

Representative government itself is in a crisis today, partly because it has lost, in the course of time, all institutions that permitted the citizens' actual participation, and partly because it is now gravely affected by the disease from which the party system suffers: bureaucratization and the two parties' tendency to represent nobody except the party machines.

The bourgeoisie, so long excluded from government by the nation-state and by their own lack of interest in public affairs, was politically emancipated by imperialism. Imperialism must be considered the first stage in political rule of the bourgeoisie rather than the last stage of capitalism.

executive branch of this particular government was not the party but the police, whose "operational activities were not regulated through party channels";

Democracy has nothing to do with freedom. Democracy is a soft variant of communism, and rarely in the history of ideas has it been taken for anything else.

A government is a compulsory territorial monopolist of ultimate decision-making (jurisdiction) and, implied in this, a compulsory territorial monopolist of taxation. That is, a government is the ultimate arbiter, for the inhabitants of a given territory, regarding what is just and what is not, and it can determine unilaterally, i.e., without requiring the consent of those seeking justice or arbitration, the price that justice-seekers must pay to the government for providing this service.

if the power of government rests on the widespread acceptance of false indeed absurd and foolish ideas, then the only genuine protection is the systematic attack of these ideas and the propagation and proliferation of true ones.

Trenton was the capital of New Jersey, home to the state government and thus filled with politicians and their ensuing scandals

in the United States, the government doesn't decide what makes a man happy. The government doesn't decide that a couple who worked hard and bought their own home and raised their family would now be happier living somewhere else.

to skim to make up the difference. To supplement your earnings. That's the American way. You can't live on what Walmart pays you. Walmart knows that. But they also know the government will make up the difference with food stamps and Medicare or whatever.

I think that the justices were totally answering the way that they should. I think that the senators, as best I could tell, for the most part, Democrat and Republican, respected that.