Quotes About Government

Even though no offer has come, I will certainly accept an offer if it comes from the BJP to join the government.

I joined NDA because Andhra Pradesh needed the Centre's handholding.

I am not cut out for politics. I don't even dream of joining politics.

We need to get rid of the Federal Elections Commission. It's a joke. It doesn't enforce the law.

Any private security is a joke in a country where you're up against your own government.

Nothing is more damaging to a state than that cunning men pass for wise.

W]hen any of the four pillars of government are mainly shaken or weakened (which are religion, justice, counsel and treasure), men had need to pray for fair weather.

So when any of the four pillars of government, are mainly shaken, or weakened (which are religion, justice, counsel, and treasure), men had need to pray for fair weather.

What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of man's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.

But we forget that government was also created to act and make decisions.

According to the historian John LeDonne, "The existence of a national network of families and client systems made a mockery of the rigid hierarchy established by legislative texts in a constant search for administrative order and 'regularity.' It explained why the Russian government, more than any other, was a government of men and not of laws."28

The courts, instead of being constraints on government, have become alternative instruments for the expansion of government.

Hoje em dia, (…) chegámos a um ponto em que os cidadãos se distraem com as teorias conspirativas mais bizarras sobre o modo como o governo está a ser manipulado por elites obscuras para lhes retirar os seus direitos, e armam-se em antecipação do momento em que terão de se defender do Estado pela força.

The English race, consequently, has long and successfully studied the art of curbing executive power to the constant neglect of the art of perfecting executive methods. It has exercised itself much more in controlling than in energizing government. It has been more concerned to render government just and moderate than to make it facile, well-ordered and effective.

This is the meaning of state autonomy: a government that is responsive to interest groups but not owned by them, that is not too easily swayed by the short-term vagaries of democratic public opinion but rather looks to long-term public interest.

Over the next three years, Pinchot turned the Division of Forestry into a Bureau of Forestry with a much larger budget and staff. Many of his closest associates in government had been fellow students at Yale—indeed, fellow members of Skull and Bones.

Successful state building is dependent, therefore, on the prior existence of a sense of national identity that serves as a locus of loyalty to the state itself, rather than to the social groups underlying it.

When used as an instrument of enforcement, the courts have morphed from constraints on government to mechanisms by which the scope of government has enormously expanded.

When an American thinks about the problem of government-building, he directs himself not to the creation of authority and the accumulation of power but rather the limitation of authority and the division of power.

The principle of effective government is meritocracy; the principle of democracy is popular participation. These two principles can be made to work together, but there is always an underlying tension between them.

However, neither rule of law nor political accountability exists in contemporary China any more than they did in dynastic China.

The rule of law constitutes a basic protection of individuals against tyrannical government. But in the second half of the twentieth century, law lost its focus as a constraint on government and became instead an instrument for widening the scope of government.

They squared this circle by creating a set of usufructuary (usage) rights that could be bought, sold, mortgaged, or transferred, in which the state nonetheless retained formal ownership.

Slavery and serfdom, while not unknown in tribal societies, expand enormously under the aegis of states.