Quotes About Citizens

If these wars between Caesar and Pompey are "worse than civil," it is because they were fought between two men who had been bound by marriage pact; in that sense, they were familial wars ("kin facing kin"), not merely between citizens.

Local government is where the rubber hits the road. While state legislators and members of Congress are more remote, local officials are present and visible. They are the first responders of politics.

Let the children who are sent to those schools be taught to read and write. . . . [and a]bove all, let both sexes be carefully instructed in the principles and obligations of the Christian religion. This is the most essential part of education – this will make them dutiful children, teachable scholars, and, afterwards, good apprentices, good husbands, good wives, honest mechanics, industrious farmers, peaceable sailors, and, in everything that relates to this country, good citizens.

Few inhabitants of the subcontinent have ever been monoglot; citizens of India have traditionally spoken three, four, or five tongues.1

Most of us, no matter what we say, are walking in the dark, whistling in the dark. Nobody knows what is going to happen to him from one moment to the next, or how one will bear it. This is irreducible. And it is true of everybody. Now, it is true that the nature of society is to create, among its citizens, an illusion of safety; but it is also absolutely true that the safety is always necessarily an illusion. Artists are here to disturb the peace.

The worse government fails, the less privacy citizens supposedly deserve.

People have been taught to expect far more from government than from freedom.

As long as rulers are above the law, citizens have the same type of freedom that slaves had on days when their masters chose not to beat them.

There are no harmless political lies about a war. The more such lies citizens tolerate, the more wars they will get.

Citizens should distrust politicians who distrust freedom.

It is unfortunate that Americans are no longer aware of what the constitution says and what their rights are. Because of that, we are often very passive about what happens when the government violates those rights.

It is amazing to think after all that has happened in this country in the last few years, the last few decades, that so many people have this blind faith that government is our friend and therefore, so we don't need protections against it.

The People, though we think of a great entity when we use the word, means nothing more than so many millions of individual men.

citizens of the pale

By the late 1830s, Indianapolis reformers were boasting of sober Fourth of July celebrations, though some of Fort Wayne's leading citizens, including directors of the branch bank and members of the local temperance society, were carried home drunk on election day in 1836.

What's more, the citizens of Natal began to assess and question the reasoning behind the war. The loudest voice came from Bishop John Colenso, an outspoken critic of the invasion since Sir Henry Bartle-Frere first spoke of the supposed 'Zulu threat'.

Americans have the right and advantage of being armed, unlike the people of other countries, whose leaders are afraid to trust them with arms.

A good government implies two things: fidelity to the object of government, which is the happiness of the people; secondly, a knowledge of the means by which that object can be best attained.

A pure democracy is a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person.

By a faction, understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.

The people are the only legitimate fountain of power, and it is from them that the constitutional charter, under which the several branches of government hold their power, is derived.

The class of citizens who provide at once their own food and their own raiment, may be viewed as the most truly independent and happy.

If we are to take for the criterion of truth the majority of suffrages, they ought to be gotten from those philosophic and patriotic citizens who cultivate their reason.

A well regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, trained in arms, is the best most natural defense of a free country.