Quotes About Government

The nature of the job of attorney general has changed - irrevocably. And we should never again have an attorney general, of either party, capable of expressing surprise at the role that national security issues now play in the life of the Justice Department or in the role of its chief.

First of all, the world criticizes American foreign policy because Americans criticize American foreign policy. We shouldn't be surprised about that. Criticizing government is a God-given right - at least in democracies.

There's a lot of good, bipartisan legislation that passes in committee and then gets bottled up. As a businessman, it surprised me.

Nothing surprises me about the Lords.

I'm in politics. I'm in government, so nothing surprises me.

Nixon was always willing to be bipartisan, so there are a lot of surprises in the man.

What most surprises me about Brazil is the extent of the difficulties that we create for ourselves. We create a lot of legislation to control the Brazilian state itself, that this ends up meaning that things don't go with the speed any head of government would like.

Public policy is a study in imperfection. It involves imperfect people, with imperfect information, facing deeply imperfect choices - so it's not surprising that they're getting imperfect results.

A surprising number of government committees will make important decisions on fundamental matters with less attention than each individual would give to buying a suit.

We have already discovered how quickly we become dependent on the Internet and its applications for business, government and research, so it is not surprising that we are finding that we can apply this technology to enable or facilitate our social interactions as well.

Just as we Liberal Democrats opposed the flawed logic of that war in Iraq - we will oppose the flawed government claim that we have to surrender our fundamental rights in order to improve our security.

The government must adopt a rights-based approach that speaks to the needs and aspirations of surrogate mothers, children born out of surrogacy, and all individuals who want access to altruistic surrogacy services.

Your friends have told to you hate the Empire, but you have never witnessed any of it firsthand. You realize, of course, that whichever government is in charge always makes the defeated enemy look like a monster. I will tell you the truth. The Empire had very little political chaos. Every person had opportunities...Everyone had a task to do, and they did it willingly.

Violence is the power of the state; imagination and non-violence the power of civil society.

Few remember that there was no significant US homeless population before the 1980s, that Ronald Reagan's new society and economy created these swollen ranks of street people. Even

This cancellation of process in government leaves it an empty violence that must perpetually and at any cost outdo itself, for it has no alternative idea and hence no alternative activity

The very term "theocracy" was coined specifically to describe Jerusalem.

there can be no a priori moral framework in a modern democracy [...]

The intention of the United States government in supporting Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war was to curb the spread of Iran's revolution, but it had the more disastrous effect of curbing its evolution.

In the words of the Iranian political philosopher Abdolkarim Soroush, "We no longer claim that a genuinely religious government can be democratic, but that it cannot be otherwise.

When it comes to dealing with a social movement, society has only two options: either it can address the members' grievances, thereby making the movement irrelevant, or it can deflect those grievances and further radicalise the movement. Or as Sidney Tarrow puts it, actions that begin in the streets [can be] resolved in the halls of government or by the bayonets of the army.

Your democratically elected governments continuously perpetuate atrocities against my people all over the world," he accused the British nation-state—his nation-state. "And your support of them makes you directly responsible, just as I am directly responsible for protecting and avenging my Muslim brothers and sisters.

Se ha dicho que cada gobierno tiene su capo.

Bonilla and Christmas, working with Zemurray, were able to frame the war as an insurgency, the people rising up against a government selling the nation to gringos and Yankee bankers, whereas what you really had was more sinister and interesting—a battle waged by a private American citizen, a corporate chief, against a debt-ridden but sovereign nation.