Quotes About Citizens

Governments cannot make marriages or turn feckless individuals into responsible citizens. That needs another kind of change agent.

We live inside a democracy, and you know, public will matters in a democracy. I just hope it's informed public will, and frankly, when the decisions are made, you understand the costs.

Why is this government so insensitive to the concerns of the middle-class people?

Politicians should inspire you to vote, they should appeal to people.

I was fascinated by what happens when government institutions fail and citizens take the law into their own hands.

We don't want to govern the country without democratic institutions.

One of my philosophies is that citizens are the mayor... so we have citizens play an integral role in making policies and implementing them.

I work for the British people. I do not gather intelligence so the government can lie to the British people.

We can't have an intelligent foreign policy unless we have an intelligent public, because we're a democracy.

I had a history teacher who taught us a lot about the Cold War. You had these examples of countries where the government had tried to manage the economy really intensely, and it ended up being bad for the citizens there. I found myself beginning to lean more right on economic issues.

No one is in favor of a bill that would force American citizens to have to interact with law enforcement in a way that wasn't appropriate.

Americans really expect to interact with our government digitally.

It is a world of extremes, which can be characterised most clearly in terms of exclusion. That means political exclusion, whereby the rights of citizens are marginalised by the interests of big business: George W Bush's environmental policy, for example, is clearly formulated in the interests of U.S. energy companies.

The international community doesn't cast a vote here. Gabonese people do, so I am accountable to them. They are the ones to give me my job or take it away. So this is what is really important to me.

A short exposure to the convention convinced me that the Internet may save the Democracy in that it is a way for the people, for the citizens, to have some direct influence on the government.

By this time, increasing numbers of citizens were traders, merchants, sailors, and brokers, who had more commercial and mercantile concerns than the earlier émigrés, who tended to support Winthrop. Ironically, the highest-born immigrant of all—Vane, the idealistic son of a member of the king's Privy Council—was, together with the free-thinker Anne Hutchinson, the champion of Boston's burgeoning middle class.

President David O. McKay declared: "No greater immediate responsibility rests upon members of the Church, upon all citizens of this Republic and of neighboring Republics than to protect the freedom vouchsafed by the Constitution of the United States." (Conference Report, April 1950, p. 37.)

We are superior to government and should remain master over it, not the other way around.

Liberty has never lasted long in a democracy, nor has it ever ended in anything better than despotism.

This line of reasoning brings us to a challenging question: If people are as incapable, as immoral, and as ignorant as the politicians indicate, then why is the right of these same people to vote defended with such passionate insistence?

See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime.

In fact, if law were restricted to protecting all persons, all liberties, and all properties; if law were nothing more than the organized combination of the individual's right to self defense; if law were the obstacle, the check, the punisher of all oppression and plunder -- is it likely that we citizens would then argue much about the extent of the franchise?

With the growth of proletarian discontent many towns are taking care to restrict the privilege of arms to the wealthy. In Troyes only those citizens possessing vingt livres vaillant ("twenty pounds' worth of property") are authorized to own a crossbow and fifty bolts.

It is not natural or inevitable that half the world goes hungry that the freedom of markets trumps protection of the planet or that citizens' rights come second to those of corporations.