Quotes About Government

Baseball may be our national pastime, but the age-old tradition of taking a swing at Congress is a sport with even deeper historical roots in the American experience. Since the founding of our country, citizens from Ben Franklin to David Letterman have made fun of their elected officials.

One bipartisan policy tradition is to deny Americans the use of our own resources.

There's a long bipartisan tradition of civil rights enforcement.

There is a tradition in America of people in business not only commenting on the way the government is being run but doing something about it if they don't like it. In fact, they don't just rail about it: they go into government, like some of my ex-colleagues.

People don't realize that the Obama Administration has been, if anything, harder on whistleblowers than the Bush Administration. Part of the reason is that they know that the response will be more muted because the traditional constituency supporting whistleblowers just happen to be the same constituency as Obama's.

The only possible role that I can see for reconciliation would be to make modest changes in the major package to improve affordability, to deal with what share of Medicaid expansion the federal government pays, those kinds of issues, which is the traditional role for reconciliation in health care.

The digital revolution has deepened the crisis within representative democracy. But as it forces its demise, it might also dictate its future. Traditional representative democracy within nations is no longer enough. People want more participation and collaboration with their government.

How will we defend ourselves if the Patriot Act expires? Well, perhaps we could just rely on the Constitution and demonstrate exactly how traditional judicial warrants can gather all the info we need - and how bulk collection really hasn't worked.

It is the right of a democratically elected parliament to act in defence of our traditional liberties, and everything should be done to keep it that way.

If you have small-government, traditional values, you may be considered by your own leadership to be an enemy of the state.

Every country has its political face and political traditions.

Governing through federal ultimatum grates against our history, traditions, and, most importantly, our Constitution.

We seek to protect and preserve life for life's own sake in everything from our most fundamental laws of homicide to our road traffic regulations to our largest governmental programs for health and social security.

I have written to Minister of State for Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions, asking him to consider 'staggered office timings' for government offices, which will help in decongesting road traffic during peak hours.

All too frequently, the knee jerk reaction to tragedies by the media and chattering class is to move to restrict our rights... Our founding documents make it clear that our inalienable rights come from God and that the job of the government is to ensure and protect those God-given rights.

It is easy to lay the blame on successive governments for failing to address health as a fundamental right for the Indian people. But the real tragedy is that we, the people of India, have not taken our government to task for this catastrophic failure.

The government needs to help those in need, but members of Congress shouldn't take advantage of the situation and use a national tragedy as an opportunity to spend taxpayer dollars on their pet projects.

Benghazi is not a scandal; Benghazi was a tragedy.

I've thought from the start that a parallel federal investigation into the death of Michael Brown is important. I also believe that our state and local elected officials have been given a responsibility by the people who they work for to get to the bottom of this tragedy.

North Korean defectors who speak out against the regime always feel nervous. We never know what the North Korean government is planning. It's really difficult for us to show our faces and speak out, but we feel obligated to do something to inform people about the ongoing tragedy inside North Korea.

It is a tragedy when you pay to make a public broadcaster survive.

That's the tragedy of our country. Everyone is an inexperienced politician.

It is the job of government to prevent a tragedy of the commons. That includes the commons of shared values and norms on which democracy depends.

Poor decision making in government; the tragedy of short-term economic thinking; our national housing crisis: these are real 21st Century problems for our country. They are problems that can only be solved by genuinely fearless thinking about our natural environment.