Quotes About Government

When they aren't being incompetent, city officials like to relax with a little corruption.

In the United States, frozen cheese pizza is regulated by the Food and Drug Administration. Frozen pepperoni pizza, on the other hand, is regulated by the Department of Agriculture.

In fact, mostly what the Forest Service does is build roads.

Iowa, to be on the safe side, outlawed conversations in any language other than English in schools, at church, or even over the telephone. When people protested that they would have to give up church services in their own languages, Governor William L. Harding responded: "There is no use in anyone wasting his time praying in other languages than English. God is listening only to the English tongue.

Fired by the oxygen of irrationality, America entered a period of grave intolerance, not just toward immigrants but toward any kind of antiestablishment behavior. The Sedition Act of 1918 made it illegal, among much else, to make critical remarks about government expenditure or even the YMCA.44 So low did standards of civil liberty fall that police routinely arrested not only almost anyone remotely suspected of sedition, but even those who came to visit them in jail.

One of the more striking features of Sweden and Norway is how much public drunkenness there is. I mean here you have two countries where you cannot buy a beer without taking out a bank loan, where successive governments have done everything in their power to make drinking not worth the cost and effort, and yet everywhere you go you see grossly intoxicated people – in stations, on park benches, in shopping centres. I don't begin to understand it

Thanks to this ruling, states now had the right to perform surgery on healthy citizens against their will—a liberty never before extended in any advanced country. Yet the case attracted almost no attention.

Interestingly, in the United States no one has died of old age since 1951, at least not officially, for in that year old age was banished as a cause from death certificates. In Britain, it is still allowed, though not much used.

By 1927, the average state was spending eight times more on enforcing fish and game laws than it spent on Prohibition.

Despite its lavish spending, the United States has one of the highest rates of both infant and maternal death among industrialized nations," according to The New York Times.

VAT Value Added Tax, a sales tax (currently 17.5 percent in Britain) imposed on nearly everything.

The tragedy for so many town councils is that they think they can quietly cut spending and no one will notice or care. The tragedy for the country may be that they are right. But

Obama doesn't know how to be President. He doesn't know how the world works. He's incompetent. He's an amateur!

At the end of the Constitutional Convention, a citizen asked Benjamin Franklin what kind of government our founders had given us. He replied, A republic, if you can keep it. That's a job no president can do alone. It's up to all of us to keep it. And to make the most of it.

approval from the Senate four years

fascinating discussion of the…cyclical nature of history. Mankind is predictable. Governments mistreat people—their own people and others. They always have, and they always will. So the people react. There is action and reaction. This is how history has progressed and how it always will.

At the end of the Constitutional Convention, a citizen asked Benjamin Franklin what kind of government our founders had given us. He replied, "A republic, if you can keep it." That's a job no president can do alone. It's up to all of us to keep it. And to make the most of it.

I close the door and plug the secure line into my laptop and pull up the triumvirate of Carolyn Brock, Liz Greenfield, and Sam Haber of Homeland Security on a three-way split screen.

The antigovernment paradigm blinds us to possibilities that lie outside its ideological litmus tests and prevents us from creating new networks of cooperation that can restore economic growth, bring economic opportunity to more people and places, and increase our ability to lead the world to a better future.

Jiang Lijun is not a vice president for the China State Construction Engineering Corporation but a senior officer with the Ministry of State Security. What the hell are the Americans up to?

In essence, governments can say to each other, "If you want to do business with us, you'll have to take climate change seriously.

Our laws and regulations are so outdated. The phrase "government policy" doesn't exactly set people's hair on fire. But policies—everything from tax rules to environmental regulations—have a huge impact on how people and companies behave. We won't get to zero unless we get this right, and we're a long way from doing that. (I'm talking here about the United States, but this applies to many other countries too.)

Charles Crenshaw, JFK: Conspiracy of Silence, Penguin Books USA, p. 106. Renas

Fascism is when corporations become the government.