Quotes About Citizens

Like all who inherit the Lockean tradition, Mises believed that a strong but limited government, far from suffocating its citizens, allows them to be productive and free.

Barcelona has always been more a city of capital and labor than of nobility and commoners; its democratic roots are old and run very deep. Its medieval charter of citizens' rights, the Usatges, grew from a nucleus which antedated the Magna Carta by more than a hundred years. Its government, the Consell de Cent (Council of One Hundred), had been the oldest protodemocratic political body in Spain.

To understand your country you must love it. To love it you must, in a sense, accept it. To accept it as it is, however, is to betray it. To accept your country without betraying it, you must love it for that in which it shows what it might become. America - this monument to the genius of ordinary men and women, this place where hope becomes capacity, this long, halting turn of the no into the yes - needs citizens who love it enough to reimagine and remake it.

It's more than surprising," Brian said. "To me it smacks of malpractice, especially when there's a good chance they didn't do any testing because I owe them so damn much money and they were afraid they'd not get paid. And that's on top of treating us like second-class citizens, making us wait for so long.

Top-down government breeds irresponsible individuals, and the confiscation of civil society by the state leads to a widespread refusal among the citizens to act for themselves.

A society governed by consent does not necessarily issue from a social contract, whether actual or implied. It is a society in which dealings between citizens, and between citizens and those in authority, are consensual, in the manner of daily courtesies, games of football, theatrical events or family meals. As Adam Smith made clear, order may emerge from consensual dealings. But it emerges 'by an invisible hand', and not, as a rule, because someone has imposed it. In

Our national jurisdictions are now bombarded by laws from outside, even though hardly any of these laws are concerned with the avoidance of war. We, the citizens, are powerless in the matter, and they, the legislators, entirely unanswerable to us, who must obey them. This is exactly what Kant dreaded, as the sure path, first to despotism and then to anarchy. The

Traditional liberalism is the view that such a society is possible only if the individual members have sovereignty over their own lives – which means being free both to grant and to withhold consent respecting whatever relations may be proposed to them. Individual sovereignty exists only where the state guarantees rights, such as the right to life, limb and property, so protecting citizens from invasion and coercion by others, including invasion and coercion by the state.

When society is organised from above, either by the top-down government of a revolutionary dictatorship, or by the impersonal edicts of an inscrutable bureaucracy, then accountability rapidly disappears from the political order, and from society, too. Top-down government breeds irresponsible individuals, and the confiscation of civil society by the state leads to a widespread refusal among the citizens to act for themselves.

The task of government was not to stop selfish striving—a hopeless task—but to harness it for the public good.

Simon Wolf wrote during Woodrow Wilson's tenure, "President Grant did more on behalf of American citizens of Jewish faith at home and abroad than all the Presidents of the United States prior thereto or since.

Sherman did not want to have to feed its citizens or assign extra troops to guard a sullen, restive population and ordered the evacuation of all residents. When the mayor pleaded that such an exodus would result in "appalling and heart-rending suffering," Sherman replied in lapidary prose: "War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it . . . You might as well appeal against the thunder storm

Sherman did not want to have to feed its citizens or assign extra troops to guard a sullen, restive population and ordered the evacuation of all residents. When the mayor pleaded that such an exodus would result in "appalling and heart-rending suffering," Sherman replied in lapidary prose: "War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it . . . You might as well appeal against the thunder storm as against these terrible hardships of war.

Cleon, who, in the fifth century BC, had reminded the citizens of another imperial power, Athens, that 'a democracy is incapable of empire'. 'Your empire', he continued, 'is a despotism and your subjects disaffected conspirators, whose obedience is ensured not by your suicidal concessions

The Citizens Commission on Human Rights, a lobby group created by the Church of Scientology that runs the psychiatry museum, maintains that no mental diseases have ever been proven to exist.

Suppose twenty years ago Congress had proposed a law saying every citizen had to wear a radio transponder around his neck, all day and all night, so the government could track him wherever he went. Can you imagine the outrage? But instead the citizens went right ahead and did it to themselves. In their pockets and purses, not around their necks, but the outcome is the same.

They wish, too, that they could warn them about the gray man in the stovepipe hat, about the King of Crows. For not all ghosts remember, and the citizens have need of warning.

New York is a city short on patience, cleanliness, clement weather, and citizens who hold faint opinions. It is not a city short of people trying to make a career of being famous, no matter what the opportunity.

The happiness of society is the end of government.

I know of no safe depository of the ultimate power of the society but the people themselves.

There is such a thing as society. It's just not the same thing as the state.

We are the state, and we shall continue to be the state until we have created the institutions that form a real community and society of men.

The information society should serve all of its citizens, not only the technically sophisticated and economically privileged.

Ensuring the access of all citizens to government information and to essential information for human development is a must for every democratic society.