Quotes About Government

In the end millions (some state upward of three million, mostly children) had died, mainly from starvation due to the federal government of Nigeria's blockade policies.

The fact that alienated people can be counted on to vent their spleen in ineffectual directions—by fighting among themselves—relieves the government of the need to deal fundamentally with the conditions which cause their frustrations

No one who lives under constant surveillance, who is subject to detention anywhere at any time, whose conversations, proclivities, and habits are recorded, stored, and analyzed, can be described as free.

Bankrupt corporate capitalism is on its way to bankrupting the socialism that is trying to save it

Money has replaced the vote.

Aristotle warned that in a democracy, there always existed the potential for the poor to seize the property of the rich. Democracy, Aristotle wrote, could not coexist with huge levels of inequality. Everyone had to have a stake in society. There were other responses to Aristotle's understanding, including from Athenian tyrants and later James Madison, who urged government to reduce democracy and cripple the political power of the working class.

The sentencing of Manning marked the day when the state formally declared that all who name and expose its crimes will become political prisoners or will be forced, like Snowden, to flee into exile.

Corporate totalitarianism, for me, is interchangeable with inverted totalitarianism, as Wolin uses that term throughout his book.

Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.1 —Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience

When it shall be said in any country in the world, 'My poor are happy; neither ignorance nor distress is to be found among them; my jails are empty of prisoners, my streets of beggars; the aged are not in want, the taxes are not oppressive; the rational world is my friend, because I am a friend of happiness—when these things can be said," wrote Paine, "then may that country boast of its constitution and its government.

Trump is not an anomaly. He is the grotesque visage of a collapsed democracy.

A failed democracy, Plato warned, creates the conditions for tyranny based on popular support.

In the West, we feel the devastating effects of one misguided, half-baked government program after another.

If a debt crisis results from government profligacy and mismanagement, rather than from a market failure, it is true that the central bank should not intervene.

You know, I really miss sex scandals. They're generally colorful. They almost never mean anything over the long run. And while they're going on, the people who actually keep the government running are let alone to go about their business. Good old sex scandals.

I'm in the government to make sure that if there's an opportunity to make peace, it won't be missed.

I missed that question on Alaska. I hear they want to make it a state now.

The federal government... knows how to put a missile in someone's room half way around the world with technology. Why don't we use some of that technology to save some lives here in America?

A missile attack is federal. A missile attack is not a local responsibility. Confirmation and notification of something like a missile attack should reside with the agency that knows first and knows for sure: in other words, the people who know should be the people who tell us.

Holding our own government to account for the use of its power is, in my view, the highest mission of a U.S. news organization.

We all went up to Washington on a mission to change things. What I found is that the Founding Fathers set it up where it's a little more difficult to do. We've got the Senate and the president to deal with.

I am dedicated to expanding Medicaid in Mississippi.

We deliberately filled our rainy-day fund to its statutory capacity over my time leading the Mississippi Senate as lieutenant governor.

President Biden is the duly-elected president and we will do everything we can to work with him to help the citizens of Mississippi.